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We are heavy with more of our favorites with their Sarah Palin thoughts.
She continues to have a stunning effect on the race. The swing states identified by Karl Rove (CO, VA, MI, and OH) and by The Economist (NV, NM, NC, CO, OH, MN, and MO) are some of the most susceptible to Sarah’s wiles.
If the polls continue to go south on Obama, he’ll have to consider the Torricelli option. (Bob Torricelli gave up his 2002 Senate re-election bid five weeks before the vote, and was replaced by Frank Lautenberg.) Obama needs for Biden to have a health event, and then Hillary can be put on the ticket.
In the meantime, Biden mentioned on Meet the Press he is going to Montana tomorrow. That’ll work. Bush won the state’s 3 electoral votes 59 to 38.
Gerard Baker’s Sarah Palin take.
The best line I heard about Sarah Palin during the frenzied orgy of chauvinist condescension and gutter-crawling journalistic intrusion that greeted her nomination for vice-president a week ago came from a correspondent who knows a thing or two about Alaska.
“What’s the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”
“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let’s be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.
“The other kills her own food.”
Now we know, thanks to her triumphant debut at the Republican convention on Wednesday, that Mrs Palin not only slaughters her prey. She impales its head on a stick and parades it around for her followers to jeer at. For half an hour she eviscerated Mr Obama in that hall and did it all without dropping her sweet schoolmarm smile, as if she were handing out chocolates at the end of a history lesson. …
David Warren says vote for the peace candidates; McCain and Palin.
… The election will necessarily be close, since the American people themselves are about equally divided between “conservative” and “liberal” assumptions about reality, and the swing vote between them is not very large. But in the campaign viewers’ oddly criss-crossed comparison — Obama versus Palin, and Biden versus McCain — the Republicans now have two winners.
The consequence, not merely to the U.S. but to the planet, of a McCain as opposed to an Obama presidency, is almost impossible to overestimate.
As I’ve argued before, the enemies of America and the West will tend to be cautious with John McCain, incautious with Barack Obama. (And with Palin behind him, they’ll be toasting McCain’s health.) It follows that a vote for McCain favours peace and stability, a vote for Obama, instability and worse.
Barbara Amiel, wife of Conrad Black, renews her political columnist vows for a WSJ piece on Sarah Palin, and Margaret Thatcher at age 49.
The glummest face Wednesday night might have been, if only we could have seen it, that of Hillary Clinton.
Imagine watching Sarah Palin, the gun-toting, lifelong member of the NRA, the PTA mom with teased hair and hips half the size of Hillary’s, who went … omigod … to the University of Idaho and studied journalism. Mrs. Palin with her five kids and one of them still virtually suckling age, going wham through that cement ceiling put there exclusively for good-looking right-wing/populist conservative females by not-so-good-looking left-wing ones (Gloria Steinem excepting). There, pending some terrible goof or revelation, stood the woman most likely to get into the Oval Office as its official occupant rather than as an intern. …
… American feminists have always had a tough sell to make. To the rest of the world, no females on earth have ever had it as easy as middle-class American women. Cosseted, surrounded by labor-saving devices, easily available contraception and supermarkets groaning with food, their complaints have always seemed to have no relationship to reality.
Education was there for the taking. Marriages were not arranged. Going against social mores had no serious consequences. Postwar American women (excluding those mired in poverty or the odious restrictions of race) have always had the choice of what they wanted to be. They simply didn’t decide to exercise it until it became more fashionable to get out of the home than to run it.
Sarah Palin has put the flim-flam nature of America feminism sharply into focus, revealing the not-so-secret hypocrisy of its code and, whatever her future, this alone is an accomplishment. As she emerged into the nation’s consciousness, a shudder went through the feminist left—a political movement not restricted to females. She is a mother refusing to stay at home (good) who had made a success out in the workplace (excellent) whose marriage nevertheless is a rip-roaring success and whose views are unspeakable—those of a red-blooded, right-wing principled pragmatist. …
Bill Kristol thanks the people responsible for the GOP success last week.
… Third: A special thank you to our friends in the liberal media establishment. Who knew they would come through so spectacularly? The ludicrous media feeding frenzy about the Palin family hyped interest in her speech, enabling her to win a huge audience for her smashing success Wednesday night at the convention. Indeed, it even renewed interest in McCain, who seems to have gotten still more viewers for his less smashing–but well-received–presentation the following evening.
The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media’s prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.
By the end of the week, after Palin’s tour de force in St. Paul, the liberal media were so befuddled that they were reduced to complaining that conservatives aren’t being narrow-minded enough. …
Sally Quinn provides a graceful exit for her harsh words about Sarah. Jennifer Rubin has the details in Contentions.
… But now Quinn has seen Palin with her own eyes and is singing a different tune. On Fox today with Bill O’Reilly, Quinn had this to say:
I thought that she was amazing. in her speech. She was funny and smart and poised and confident. She gave a great speech, beautifully delivered. I think she is going to be a formidable opponent. all of that I think is — I was wrong about her. and I didn’t know anything about her. I probably didn’t know any more than John McCain did a few days before he picked her.
(Well, perhaps McCain knew plenty and chose her on this basis, but that’s a quibble.) O’Reilly went on to ask her if ”your column and other columns like yours rallied the folks to her side and actually helped the McCain-Palin ticket dramatically.” Quinn answered “I think you’re absolutely right.” …
Jennifer also links to a WSJ Kimberly Strassel piece on Palin’s successes in Alaska.
The notion that Sarah Palin is unaccomplished and untested is frankly a media invention. For those who bother to examine her actual record, the facts tell a different story. Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal rightly notes that from media coverage ” you’ve heard plenty about her religious views and private family matters,” but precious little about what she has done in office. Strassel tries to correct this by describing in blow-by-blow fashion Palin’s record in bringing down a corrupt machine and taking on the oil companies. …
Volokh reports on the Israeli flag in Sarah Palin’s office.
The Economist bellwether series continues. This time with Minnesota.
ON A hot summer day at Shady Oak Lake, teenagers line up for the high-diving board. Parents with small children wade in the shallows near the sandy beach. This suburban idyll, surrounded by leafy trees and big houses, lies near Edina, a town just west of Minnesota’s Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. Despite appearances, it is a political ground zero in a state the Republicans are fighting to snatch from the Democrats.
Minnesota is famous as a liberal bastion. It is the only state not to have voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972, and has its own (traditionally leftier) brand of Democrats in the Democratic-Farmer-Labour Party. …
… But look a little closer, and Minnesota seems a more attractive target. Presidential votes in the state have been very close lately, decided by fewer than four points. Barack Obama leads by only low single digits in most recent polls. Minnesota has a Republican senator, Norm Coleman, who beat Mr Mondale in 2002. Many predicted that the state’s Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, would be Mr McCain’s running-mate. The state also tends to move along with fellow “Frost Belt” states such as Iowa and Wisconsin, with which it shares media markets. Combined, that block has as many electoral votes as Florida, a perennial battleground. …
Instapundit spots an important story about Chicago and its failed administration.
I think we should just pull out of Chicago: …
Here’s the story from CBS News in Chicago.
CHICAGO (CBS) ? An estimated 123 people were shot and killed over the summer. That’s nearly double the number of soldiers killed in Iraq over the same time period.
In May, cbs2chicago.com began tracking city shootings and posting them on Google maps. Information compiled from our reporters, wire service reports and the Chicago Police Major Incidents log indicated that 123 people were shot and killed throughout the city between the start of Memorial Day weekend on May 26, and the end of Labor Day on Sept. 1.
According to the Defense Department, 65 soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq. About the same number were killed in Afghanistan over that same period.
In the same time period, an estimated 245 people were shot and wounded in the city. …