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Still Not Getting Palin
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Joni Balter yesterday:
Palin is the kind of brash, good-looking, in-your-face candidate who connects with working-class women. She's more like everymoms than Obama. Yes, sure, he was raised by a single mother and grandparents, but in the end, he went to Harvard.Somehow, an election supposedly about issues has devolved into a campaign about personal narrative, and that is how McCain wants it.
I suspect the Palin effect will fade in the days and weeks ahead. She is one deer-in-the-headlights answer away from scaring the very same people currently embracing her.
All the enthusiasm and rooting for this woman will give way to a realization that she has too much on her plate. She is being asked to manage a steep learning curve on national and international issues and still be a mom in a family with five kids, including a special-needs baby and a pregnant daughter.
Enthusiasm for Sarah Palin's presence on the GOP ticket might fade. But, it's not likely to for the reasons Balter enunciates. For part of the reason why, see this lucid moment from Joe Klein in the middle of his near-What's the Matter with Kansas style assessment:
We haven't been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. It is the suburbanites and city dwellers who do the fighting and hourly-wage work now, and the corporations who grow our food. But Palin's embrace of small-town values is where her hold on the national imagination begins. She embodies the most basic American myth -- Jefferson's yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness -- updated in a crucial way: now Mom works too. Palin's story stands with one foot squarely in the nostalgia for small-town America and the other in the new middle-class reality. She brings home the bacon, raises the kids -- with a significant assist from Mr. Mom -- hunts moose and looks great in the process. I can't imagine a more powerful, or current, American Dream.
Part of the foremost appeal of the McCain-Palin ticket is you know they're going to be no friend to establishment Washington, DC. Yet the common-man - or woman! - appeal is more powerful than people realize (I repeat, read this book).
That's not going to fade if Palin can't give an intricate answer on the best way to restart the Doha round of WTO talks on harmonizing international trade. Nor will they recede if she isn't entirely comfortable explaining the difference between HMO's and PPO's in the Medicare Advantage program.
Sarah Palin is popular because she is...Sarah Palin. Her life story and record getting here isn't going change. Likewise, neither is the gravitational pull some in the electorate feel towards her.
Besides, belittling the VP nominee and presuming they would drag down the ticket worked so well in 1988 - with a VP pick who was just slightly less electrifying.
Cross-posted at Sound Politics.
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