RNC Notebook: Palin punches, but what does she hit?
chicagobusiness.com
By Greg Hinz
Sept. 04, 2008
(Crain’s) — The moose lady knows how to throw a punch.
GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin clearly did her job last night, shifting the focus from herself to Barack Obama in a rousing speech that clearly has Illinois Republicans pumped in a way they have not been in quite awhile.
That’s no minor accomplishment. Ms. Palin was cool, controlled and comfortable on the big stage. She was convincing. In the great contact sport known as politics, intensity can be everything.
But if the Alaska governor gets an A for style, her mark for content is, at best, a B, in my book.
Democrats immediately and correctly pounced on Ms. Palin’s decision to all but ignore the year’s biggest issue, the sagging economy.
She fibbed about killing off the so-called bridge to nowhere in Alaska — she was for it before she was against it, and ended up accepting the money and using it for something else — and rather grossly distorted Mr. Obama’s position on tax cuts.
Yes, she was tougher and icier than an arctic breeze, a stance that some GOP strategists privately acknowledge was designed to make up for her lack of experience. She even ridiculed the Chicagoan who would be president for spending the first few years of his post-graduate life not making money but working as an organizer with laid-off steelworkers and their families on the Southeast Side.
So much for nobility. But the attack is a good tip off as to what’s really occurring in St. Paul this week.
What’s really occurring is that John McCain’s Republicans are at least partially dumping their brand — experience — in favor of Mr. Obama’s trademark change-and-reform. And the transition has had bumps.
Team McCain really didn’t have a choice but to change its message. The experience schtick “wasn’t working,” former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson conceded in a brief chat during the week.
The media caught on right away to the disconnect between Mr. McCain’s months of ridiculing Mr. Obama as dangerously inexperienced and his vice-presidential selection of a 20-month governor of a small state. It’s been asking lots and lots of questions.
Like why Ms. Palin, the “reformer,” hired the former chief of staff to indicted U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens to arrange for $27 million of earmarked pork projects for her hometown. Like what affiliation she and her husband had to a group that wants a vote on Alaska independence. Like the significance of an Alaska probe in alleged abuse of power by the governor.
Team McCain didn’t like it. And they didn’t want to make her available for questions. So it responded last night with a barrage reminiscent of a Richard Nixon convention 35 years ago.
Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Rudi Giuliani and Sarah Palin alike railed against East Coast elites, foreign policy apologists, evil liberals and, above all the media — which, perhaps except the National Enquirer, has been just doing its job. Only Mike Huckabee mixed it up a bit.
No one used Spiro Agnew’s old line about nabobs of negativism. But the chants of “USA, USA” would have done a construction site full of hard hats proud. The chortling about “cosmopolitan” Democrats, the paeans to small-town values, would have fit right into one of Mr. Nixon’s appeals to the silent majority.
Almost makes me want to dig out that old pair of bell bottoms from the bottom of the closet. Almost.
Yes, it’s politics. And, yes, Team Obama threw a few pitches of its own in Denver.
But unless I’m mistaken, Americans are ready to move beyond slash-and-burn politics to actually get things done in Washington.
Perhaps Mr. McCain will dangle a little bipartisanship tonight. But Wednesday night was the heart of this Republican National Convention.
For Ronald Reagan, it always was morning in America. For Team McCain, it was time to rail against “them.”
We’ll see if it works. |
