Sometime is this line of work you wander into history in the making. There are days in which nothing inspiring, interesting, or fun happens covering a political campaign. Last night was not one of those times.
I was inside the Xcel Center yesterday evening for actually two remarkable events. The first was the reaffirmation that Rudy Giuliani is the great non-candidate speechmaker in America. His presidential aspirations went strangely awry last year for reasons not altogether clear, but last night he did what he did best. Like a prize fighter he weaved — weaved jokes, humor, and biting argument — and bobbed with schoolboy-like glee. Politics, we forget, is supposed to be fun. And Rudy’s speech was that and more.
Stylistically and substantively it was an exceptionally deft speech. He used humor to decimate the premise of Barack Obama’s campaign: that someone who has accomplished nothing of note in public life, and whose judgment on foreign policy has proved unsteady, nevertheless can be trusted with the presidency. Inside the Xcel center the crowd played along, screaming with delight and throwing their heads back with shock. “Did he say that!” “Oh my—I can’t believe he went there!” That’s what delighted partisans whispered and indeed shouted to each other. Clearly he is destined to spend the next 60 days on the campaign trail.
But that was not the main event. Sarah Palin had that honor. The buildup to that — to the campaign speech of the new millennium, I would argue — was vital to its success. For several days the MSM whacked her like a piñata. She was a hick, she was unvetted, she had no political skills, she added nothing to the ticket, no one cares that she is a woman — and on it went. That all ensured that hers was the most important speech of any of the four candidates on the presidential ticket. And indeed the Xcel Center buzzed with nervous excitement and anticipation all day.
But nothing really could have prepared the crowd for what they saw. She began with a tentative smile, but the crowd was anything but tentative. After days of siege by the mainstream media, the assembled delegates greeted her and her declaration of acceptance of the VP nomination with thunderous cheers and with a sense of heavy defiance. “We adore you” was the message. But that love affair was just the beginning.
Others will dissect the use of humor, the ease of presentation, the remarkable fluidity with the teleprompter (can she teach John McCain that?), the reasoned argumentation on energy policy, and the feisty jabs at both halves of the Democratic ticket. I can tell you the reaction of the crowd. They were simply transfixed and, frankly, stunned. Conservative pundits and delegates alike looked at each periodically — “Can you believe this?!” was the refrain. Indeed they could not. It is impossible in the cocoon of a political convention not to be engulfed in a media storm and not to fret. (“Could the MSM be right for once?”)
As she moved from biography to attack to defense of her own record, it slowly began to dawn on those in the hall: she was not only going to meet expectations, she was going to transform the race. The sense of relief was slowly replaced by an outpouring of joy and of feisty defiance. “The MSM is ruined,” conservatives laughed to one another. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how the media would explain their behavior in the days before the speech and sweep away the now entirely discredited and media-invented proposition that she was an unvetted and badly mistaken choice.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the crowd swooned. The motion was repeated again and again — a delegate or conservative activist or pundit would clutch their chest in mock coronary distress, look at a neighbor, and throw back his head with a hearty laugh. “The girl of my dreams!” one youngish pundit shouted.
It is an understatement to say that conservatives coming into this Convention were nervous, and not just because of the prospects for victory in the fall. They worried that the conservative movement, regardless of the outcome of the 2008 election, lacked a standard bearer. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was still too young, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty perhaps a bit too bland. And then lighting hit the crowd. Is she — dare I say — the one? Not “The One” — conservatives are not given to blasphemy –– but the one to lead them to the secular promised land of political victory.
As they exited the hall, delegates chatted with pundits and pundits with activists. The conversations covered roughly the same points: the pundits had been humiliated, Palin had slain their enemy (the MSM) and inflicted wounds on their opponents (the Democratic ticket), Palin had not just stabilized the McCain camp but juiced it up and assured feverish intensity of support from every element of the base, and — perhaps most critically — they had found the most attractive, engaging, culturally savvy, and articulate leader imaginable for their cause that anyone in a generation had seen.
At one point she asked the crowd what the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom was. (The answer: lipstick). The same might be hoped by conservatives is true of she and Ronald Reagan. But in a sense she provided something Reagan did not (because of his age and personal bearing) other than gender diversity: an alternative conservative pop culture icon. Conservatives hate to be thought of as stuffy. The lady aint stuffy! She combines a sense of adventure with a contemporary family and a picture of feminine beauty with one of steely determination to fight the cultural elite in America.
Vodkapundit Stephen Green said: “Feisty, funny, fierce.” But she is also the future. And that is why Sarah Palin today has the entire GOP in the palm of her hand.
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