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It’s Sarah Palin Day today. Watching her Friday, was like watching the next generation come on stage. She looks like she will be a force in national politics for a long time to come.
However, Mrs. Pickerhead says, “Don’t be gloating before the voting.” Guess she’s been hanging around Jesse Jackson.
We’ll start with Palin posts from some of our favorite blogs. Larry Kudlow posted early Friday morning.
If the rumors about Sarah Palin are true, I will be thrilled.
Thru a whole bunch at the Corner and then ending with Mark Steyn.
… Third, real people don’t define “experience” as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. … Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain’t run nothin’ but his mouth. She’s done the stuff he’s merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party’s corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol (see his campaign’s thuggish attempt to throttle Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg on WGN the other night). …
The Weekly Standard’s Blog. This from Noemie Emery on what Sarah does for the race.
1. Steps on the story of Obama’s speech (and convention), and possibly the bounce coming from them, and wipes them off the news cycle. The Sunday news shows will be all-Palin, all of the time.
2. Sends Republicans into their convention on a huge head of steam.
3. Wipes out the image of McCain as the crotchety elder and brings back that of the fly-boy and gambler, which is much more appealing, and the genuine person.
4. Revs up the base AND excites independents, which no one else in the party, or perhaps in the world, could have accomplished.
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Contentions‘ Peter Wehner.
Governor Palin was, I think, a very shrewd pick. She will energize the GOP base, which was considered almost an impossibility a few months ago. She has a very appealing life story, and a nice, agreeable, easy-to-listen-to speaking style. In her remarks, she made all the right points in all the right ways. This was not a Dan Quayle moment or anything close. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Republicans came away reassured rather than concerned. …
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There’s now a lot of attention on Governor Sarah Palin and her qualifications (or lack thereof) to be Vice President.
I suppose the first thing to point out is that based on her record, she’s more qualified than Barack Obama–as the former community organizer and state senator from Chicago is running to be President rather than, as is the case with Palin, Vice President. But let’s stick with an apples-to-apples comparison. Governor Palin, it’s said, doesn’t have sufficient experience to be the vice presidential nominee. Compare her record to that of Joe Biden, who has been in the Senate since the early 1970’s.
Let’s do. I would submit as Exhibit A this Wall Street Journal piece by Dan Senor, who served as a senior adviser to the Coalition in Iraq and was based in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004. Dan, who is both extremely knowledgeable and a very insightful thinker, reminds us of Biden’s passionate advocacy for a soft partition of Iraq. But because Biden was, in retrospect, so obviously wrong in his analysis and his recommendation, his biggest foreign policy initiative has dropped into a memory hole.
Joseph Biden has experience. But on a range of matters–from Supreme Court appointments to Iraq to much else–he’s shown deeply flawed judgment. His signature plan was a mistake; as Senor points out, it would be nice if he and Senator Obama acknowledged it.
Sarah Palin has nothing to fear in being compared to, and facing off against, Joe Biden.
Jennifer Rubin.
Fred Barnes explains that Sarah Palin’s selection doesn’t just shake up the race, it may shake up the Republican Party. The latter is badly in need of just that, having lost its Congressional majority, a number of governorships and most importantly its ideological direction. Politics is about ideas, but compelling personalities are needed to carry those ideas. So great hopes reside in the “pro-life, pro-gun, pro-military, pro-Iraq war, pro-spending cuts, pro-tax cuts, pro-drilling for oil everywhere (including ANWR), pro-family, and pro-religion” Palin.
It is ironic that it should be John McCain who, if this is successful, would be credited with finding the path to the GOP’s revival and reinvigoration. McCain certainly is not known as a “Party man.” To the contrary, his role in dividing and infuriating his fellow Republicans nearly cost him the nomination. …
Ed Morrissey says Obama’s convention bounce is gone.
… Once again, the polling numbers show that the Obama speech was a dud. Most of his bounce came from speeches given by Hillary and Bill Clinton, as they did their best to unify the party behind the nominee. Obama had an opportunity to play for the center, but instead of sounding presidential and accommodating, he offered the same tired stump speech, the same Bush bashing, and the same vagaries as people heard — even if he did deliver it from a big stage with lots of fireworks.
After squandering a double-digit lead this summer, nothing Obama has done shows that he can make a comeback on his own. He barely survived the primaries after taking the momentum from Hillary in February, and now he’s lost it to McCain. The more America sees of Barack Obama, the more they appear to like John McCain, and now the Republicans have the opportunity to seize the momentum for good this week.
Bill Kristol says the Left is scared to death of Sarah.
A spectre is haunting the liberal elites of New York and Washington–the spectre of a young, attractive, unapologetic conservatism, rising out of the American countryside, free of the taint (fair or unfair) of the Bush administration and the recent Republican Congress, able to invigorate a McCain administration and to govern beyond it.
That spectre has a name–Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska chosen by John McCain on Friday to be his running mate. There she is: a working woman who’s a proud wife and mother; a traditionalist in important matters who’s broken through all kinds of barriers; a reformer who’s a Republican; a challenger of a corrupt good-old-boy establishment who’s a conservative; a successful woman whose life is unapologetically grounded in religious belief; a lady who’s a leader.
So what we will see in the next days and weeks–what we have already seen in the hours after her nomination–is an effort by all the powers of the old liberalism, both in the Democratic party and the mainstream media, to exorcise this spectre. They will ridicule her and patronize her. They will distort her words and caricature her biography. They will appeal, sometimes explicitly, to anti-small town and anti-religious prejudice. All of this will be in the cause of trying to prevent the American people from arriving at their own judgment of Sarah Palin.
That’s why Palin’s spectacular performance in her introduction in Dayton was so important. Her remarks were cogent and compelling. Her presentation of herself was shrewd and savvy. I heard from many who watched Palin–many of them not predisposed to support her–about how moved they were by her remarks, her composure, and her story. She will have a chance to shine again Wednesday night at the Republican convention. …
Sarah Baxter from the London Times on McCain’s VP pick.
When Sarah Palin stepped into the spotlight as John McCain’s running mate in Dayton, Ohio, and promised that women could “shatter that glass ceiling once and for all”, it was an electrifying moment in a presidential election that had already produced its share of upsets and surprises.
History was on the march again the morning after Barack Obama became the first African-American to accept his party’s White House nomination. After the fireworks, the 80,000-strong crowd who had cheered Obama to the skies at the Mile High stadium in Denver woke up with a hangover.
“We may be seeing the first woman president. As a Democrat, I am reeling,” said Camille Paglia, the cultural critic. “That was the best political speech I have ever seen delivered by an American woman politician. Palin is as tough as nails.”
With her beehive hairdo and retro specs, Palin, 44, has a “naughty librarian vibe”, according to Craig Ferguson, the Scottish comedian who stars on late-night US television. However, the selection of Palin, the governor of Alaska and a mother of five, as the first female Republican vice-presidential nominee is no joke for the Democrats.
Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio chat show host, exulted, “We’re the ones with a babe on the ticket” — one, moreover, with a reputation as a tax-cutter and corruption buster in her job as the first woman governor of Alaska.
Palin’s selection on the eve of the Republican convention in St Paul, Minnesota, has set the stage for an epic battle for the votes of women, African-Americans, evangelical Christians and the young. The demographic wars that dominated the contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton are now set to be replicated in the national election.
Will America fall in love with Palin or will she fizzle, like Dan Quayle, the vice-president to George Bush Sr who could not spell “potatoe”? Can she help McCain to defeat Obama, a modern political phenomenon, who drew a record-shattering television audience of nearly 40m — more than the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing — to watch his convention speech?
“Good Lord, we had barely 12 hours of Democrat optimism,” said Paglia. “It was a stunningly timed piece of PR by the Republicans.”
Whether Palin’s selection is more than a political stunt depends on how she handles the electoral pressure cooker. …
Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice called for Palin back in May in the Jewish World Review.
… Because of Palin’s reputation as a maverick, and her initial reduction of state spending (including pork-barrel spending), life-affirming Palin connects with voters and has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential running mate for John McCain.
She would be a decided asset — an independent Republican governor, a woman, a defender of life against the creeping culture of death and a fresh face in national politics, described in “the Almanac of National Politics” as “an avid hunter and fisher with a killer smile who wears designer glasses and heels, and hair like modern sculpture.” …
The August Dream Cruise on Woodward Avenue in the Detroit area puts the lie to Bill Ford’s statement that the “American love affair with the car was over.” One of Pickerhead’s daughters and all of his grandchildren live four blocks from the action, and he has stood on Woodward a couple of times with two and three hour smiles on his face. MSN.com has details from this year’s Cruise. Links to lots of pictures.
American muscle, right down to the Cragar mags, is what the Woodward Dream Cruise is about. If you didn’t live American Graffiti, Woodward is your chance to time-warp 16 miles of it.
If fat-fendered cars make your rockin’ world go ‘round, then the Woodward Dream Cruise is your sort of party. The largest one-day automotive event on the planet — take that, Pebble Beach — Woodward is all about real people and real cars driving on a real road.
So what brings an estimated one million people and 40,000 cars to Detroit? Six lanes of urban boulevard, lined for almost the entire 16-mile cruise route with strip malls and burger joints. Once a street-racing haven and always a cruising scene, Woodward Avenue runs straight through the Detroit suburbs and into the heart of American car culture. …