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Nick Cohen in The Observer, UK writes on how the liberals in the press paved the way for Sarah Palin’s success.
My colleagues in the American liberal press had little to fear at the start of the week. Their charismatic candidate was ahead in virtually every poll. George W Bush was so unpopular that conservatives were scrambling around for reasons not to invite the Republican President to the Republican convention. Democrats had only to maintain their composure and the White House would be theirs. During the 1997 British general election, the late Lord Jenkins said that Tony Blair was like a man walking down a shiny corridor carrying a precious vase. He was the favourite and held his fate in his hands. If he could just reach the end of the hall without a slip, a Labour victory was assured. The same could have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.
For once, the postmodern theories so many of them were taught at university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was ‘the other’ – the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against. They might have soberly examined her reputation as an opponent of political corruption to see if she was truly the reformer she claimed to be. They might have gently mocked her idiotic creationism, while carefully avoiding all discussion of the racist conspiracy theories of Barack Obama’s church.
But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor’s office. …
Speaking of ugly and berserk, John Fund says the Dems have sent 30 lawyers to Alaska to dig into Sarah’s past.
Jonah Goldberg says Team Obama is rattled.
Barack Obama, a famous fan of pickup basketball, must recognize his plight: It’s two on one now. John McCain drafted Gov. Sarah Palin, the star point guard from the Wasilla Warriors, to double-team Obama.
(McCain’s team doesn’t care if no one covers Joe Biden, who seems to spend most of his time yelling to the media, “I’m open! I’m open!” But when he gets the ball, all he does is talk about what a great player he is and dribble in place.)
So after the halftime show of the political conventions, to strain the sports metaphor a bit further, it looks as if the change-up in strategy has Team Obama rattled and in danger of choking. Polls — the closest thing we have to a scoreboard — show that McCain, at least temporarily, has taken the lead. The Real Clear Politics average of national polls since Friday shows McCain ahead by a razor-thin (and statistically meaningless) 2.9 percentage points. The USA Today-Gallup poll has McCain leading by a whopping 10 points among likely voters (and four points among registered voters), though that’s almost surely an overstatement.
The McCain-Palin convention bounce also all but closed the ticket’s gender gap. According to Rasmussen, Obama had a 14-point lead among women; now it’s three. According to the latest ABC/Washington Post poll, McCain now has a 12-point lead among white women. …
Roger Simon thinks it’s sweet how McCain got his big bounce just when Olbermann and Matthews got yanked.
I must say it’s amusing that on the day John McCain bounced to a ten-point lead (likely voters) over his unprepared opponent, MSNBC gave the hook to its “nattering nabobs” of bourgeois pseudo-leftism – Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews. Somehow parent company NBC got the idea these clowns were not up to moderating a serious political debate. So much for sideshows.
Meanwhile the mainstream media must be in a state of shock. Their hero is in serious jeopardy of losing. …
Byron York says painting Palin as an extremist won’t work.
Jonah Goldberg finds Pelosi touting raising five children as preparation for the work in Congress.
… That experience forced me to be disciplined, diplomatic, focused, and successful, and I brought that discipline and focus to the Congress. Also, having a family keeps you focused on the future, which is the biggest inspiration in politics. …
Say What? Ed Morrissey says now Obama thinks tax cuts might not be a good idea.
… Obama has campaigned successfully on economics mostly through populist rhetoric and class warfare. He has cast the Bush cuts as egregious without explaining the five years of solid growth they produced. Now that he has to start getting past the slogans and start producing specifics, he seems lost and self-contradictory. Small wonder that McCain has closed the gap on economic stewardship from 19 points to three in the latest polling. Voters have begun to realize that Obama is making it up as he goes along.
Nor does Morrissey think the old “cell phone mime” will save Barack.
Barack Obama’s sudden decline in the polls have some of his supporters, and even some of John McCain’s backers, wondering whether the nosedive accurately reflects popular opinion. Obama’s strength comes with younger voters, they note, and younger voters use cell phones more often as a substitute for land lines — and pollsters don’t call cell phones. The implication is that Obama may be underrepresented by these polls and is performing stronger than people suspect.
Well, anything is possible, but as John Kerry can tell you, building hopes on massive youth turnout usually sets a candidate up for severe disappointment. …
Want a great example of how the media is biased against Palin. Jim Lindgren of Volokh catches Anderson Cooper with his pants down.
And Samizdata catches a lie from The Economist.
The Corner catches WaPo. Not a lie per se, but a half truth nonetheless.
Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard with some of the background of the Palin pick.
… With the nomination in hand, McCain decided that he wanted his vice-presidential selection to be bold and leaned toward picking Joe Lieberman. But after an extensive look at the practical realities of selecting Lieberman and listening to the arguments for and against taking that dramatic step, McCain realized it wouldn’t work. He turned his sights to three other candidates: Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, and Sarah Palin. Romney was always a default candidate, but never a likely pick. Pawlenty had several backers among McCain’s top advisers and, though McCain likes Pawlenty, he saw the pick as too conventional. There was a bold if risky choice remaining: Sarah Palin.
McCain had been impressed by Palin during a 15-minute conversation back in February and spoke to her again on August 24. She did not have a strong advocate among McCain’s top advisers, and more than one cautioned him about the risks of picking someone with such limited experience. And as he had on Iraq, McCain listened to that advice, considered the politically safe choice, and then rejected it in favor of something bolder and riskier.
The early results have been promising, and McCain’s team is confident that she will be a major asset over the next two months.
“You do not get to 80 percent approval by not being a good politician,” said a senior McCain adviser. “I don’t care how red your state is or how blue it is–if it’s Alaska or California–you don’t get to 80 percent without being good.” …
David Harsanyi with a dim view of the Fannie/Freddie bailout.
… Isn’t it ironic that government bars a citizen from risking his own Social Security funds because it’s too chancy, yet it uses your money to bail out companies that have engaged in the very behavior government is supposedly safeguarding us from?
And really, what’s more risky than letting Washington handle your money?
Tunku Varadarajan interviews a world-class travel writer.
I knew Paul Theroux could turn a phrase, but I hadn’t realized that he could turn heads, too. As we walk to dinner at the restaurant at the Taj Boston hotel — formerly the dowdy old Ritz, now elegantly restored to world-class panache — a number of ladies of a certain age are . . . how else to put it? . . . checking him out. “It’s this suit,” Mr. Theroux observes. Hand-stitched by a tailor in Bombay, the suit — of Italian white linen, with pinstripes — is indeed eye-catching.
Mr. Theroux has not gone through life unnoticed. How could he? He travels widely, talks to anyone who will talk to him — on trains, planes and buses, in cities, villages and jungles — and then writes about all of it in prose too highly spiced for some prissy palates. “They don’t read me in English departments, you know. I’m too rude about people, they say.”
Rudeness-in-print is not, of course, Mr. Theroux’s only skill. Nor is he rude all the time: In fact, much of his writing reflects affection for the people in whose midst he is apt to find himself, and a spirit of inquiry that is part anthropological and part autobiographical. Yet he hates to be thought of as a “travel writer” — in spite of the fact that he practically invented the modern genre of travel writing. “A traveling writer is what I am, and at times a romantic voyeur.” …
Columbia Journalism Review with the story of Times of London snide remark about Wasilla, Alaska. Local paper responds.
… A description which Wasilla’s Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman calls in an editorial today “as inaccurate and unfair as it would be for anyone else to define England by a stereotypical lack of dental hygiene.” …
Dilbert posts on the campaign and the Palin pick
Recently I was gigantic. Or so it seemed because I was attending a school open house and sitting in a tiny chair designed either for a small child or an elf with one buttock. Context is everything.
I was thinking about context as I observed with fascination McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. The immediate response from my lefty friends was that McCain was insane to pick a running mate with such a thin resume. That’s one possibility. The other explanation is more interesting.
My first response to McCain’s decision was to assume that Republicans did not suddenly forget how to win elections. If selecting Palin was a brilliant strategy in disguise, how exactly was it supposed to work?
Context.
McCain had a context problem. He was an old (too old) white guy from the failed establishment running against a younger and more exotic agent of change. It was a losing context. His choice of Palin changed the context.
Since selecting Palin, the discussion in the media and in kitchens across America has shifted from “Can you be too old to be President?” to “Can you be too young and inexperienced?” McCain has cleverly put his critics in the position of arguing that experience is a good thing. And McCain has more of it than Obama. If you believe that people only vote for presidents, not vice presidents, this was a clever move. …