Assessing Palin's Big Speech

ST. PAUL, Minn.--Game on.

Alaska Governor and freshly-minted Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin just finished her much-anticipated acceptance speech at the Xcel Center here in St. Paul, and I can say with 100 percent certainty that the most powerful part, at least for the journalists in attendance, came about a quarter of the way in. "Here's a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators," she said. "I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion--I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country." I say "powerful," but mostly I mean "terrifying." That's because immediately after Palin finished the line, a large group of enraged delegates turned from the floor to the press rafters and began chanting "NBC! NBC! NBC!" They were shaking their fists, but that was only because their torches and pitchforks were confiscated at the security checkpoint. Throughout the night, one gentleman in particular kept shooting me unsettling glances, as if to say, "I know where you blog."

This is American politics at its best: wild, woolly and just a little weird.  

I imagine that if I'd had the courage to ask my malefactor to name his favorite part of Palin's speech, he would've said, "All of them"--as would any of his fellow conventioneers. In the hall, the response was rapturous. Written by former George W. Bush scribe Matthew Scully, Palin's address was perfectly calibrated to please tonight's conservative crowd--as well it should've been--and Palin herself was preternaturally poised, amazingly at ease and completely and utterly a natural. She delighted in bashing the media ("If you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone"). She reveled in the goodness of the small-town folks "who grow our food, run our factories and fight our wars." She heaped praise on John McCain's character and courage, some of it approaching poetry. "He's the kind of fellow whose name you will find on war memorials in small towns across this country, only he was among those who came home," Palin said, in one particularly well-phrased passage. "To the most powerful office on earth, he would bring the compassion that comes from having once been powerless... [and] the special confidence of those who have seen evil, and seen how evil is overcome."

And perhaps most memorably, she ripped into Barack Obama with reams and reams of ridicule. Following warm-up act Rudy Giuliani--who resembled in his delightfully relentless (and partially improvised) roasting of Obama nothing so much as a Republican Don Rickles--Palin pleasantly but methodically mocked every aspect of her rival's appeal, slicing into his experience and ego with a sharpened stiletto and a smile. "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,'" she said, in one of the most popular lines of the night, "except that you have actual responsibilities." Zing. Thrown some red meat, the Republican Party ate it up. As political performances go--tone, tenor, timing and material--Palin was pitch-perfect.

That said, the GOP was ready to fall in love. The more interesting reactions will come from the press, and, by extension, the rest of America. I guarantee that the reviews will be positive, and rightfully so. For much of the week, the media has obsessed over Palin's complicated (and largely irrelevant) personal life, from her DUI husband to her pregnant teenage daughter. In the absence of any additional appearances--she's spent the five days since joining the ticket ensconced in a Minneapolis hotel room--the pundits and prognosticators simply had nothing else to talk about.

Now they can obsess over her performance. Fixated on process, they'll marvel at how smoothly she plays the attack dog, allowing McCain--in whose mouth the same lines would sound cantankerous and cranky--to float above the fray. They'll note that Palin's smiling attacks are particularly dangerous to Dems because they're aimed at women and middle-class voters who see themselves in her. They'll analyze the sexual subtext of the new McCain-Palin ticket, claiming that middle-American men will be drawn to an attractive "gal" (Palin) who "stands up for her man" (McCain). They'll explain the lack of "policy details" in Palin's speech by saying that her focus on biography and character is the best way for the GOP to appeal to independents--a group that votes for people first and issues second (and would recoil from her hard-right record). And they'll celebrate how, as a woman and a "reformer," she helps McCain compete with Obama for the mantle of "change." Of course, none of this stuff--all of which I've distilled from real conversations with reporters here in the hall--would've surprised anyone remotely familiar with Palin's spunky charisma. But before tonight, most MSMers weren't. As a result, the chatterati set the bar very low--and they'll give Palin a lot of credit for clearing it (which she did with room to spare).

Ultimately, however, I suspect that the shelf life of tonight's speech will be brief. It was short on specifics substance-free. It was largely negative--and while sarcasm works in the moment, it tends to curdle as time goes by. And many of its assaults on Obama's record were misleading. That said, none of these complaints will affect the all-important narrative. Before tonight, Sarah Palin was a cipher to most Americans--more a collage of talking points, headlines, biographical details, rumors, speculation and opposition research than a real person. But now voters know something about her, firsthand: that she confronted her opponents head-on--even if the opposition was in part a "sexist" press corps that exists only in the fevered minds of McCain's strategists--and triumphed, as it were, over adversity. For them, clearing that bar is a credential of its own.

Tomorrow, the Palin storyline will shift from "Who is this person?" to "Wow, she was pretty good"--and after a week under siege, that should come as a relief to McCain and Co. Still, it's now up to Palin to prove that she can handle the crucial questions--on inexperience, on Troopergate, on whether her reform record is really what she says it is. And she'll have to do it without a teleprompter.