Sarah Palin: Snarky Attack Fish

Gov. Sarah Palin's speech last night was not in any way historic. She's not, of course, the first woman nominated on the ticket of a major party (Geraldine Ferraro--1984); she didn't have anything new, or interesting, or exciting, or useful to say.

She was very effective in delivering her speech, which had two major points: 1) we must idolize John McCain; and 2) Sen. Obama is less cool than me. She had this cute little wrinkle of her nose at times, and she made good eye contact with the cameras. For the most part, she read her TelePrompter accurately. She reminded me of someone--later, I thought of it: it's Julia Roberts. A similar tone of voice, good with the needle, brunette, similar facial features (a little wider face, but that's OK). Julia would wear Palin's geeky glasses, but not the hairstyle.

Sen. Harry Reid responded to her attacks by calling her speech "shrill"--or at least, his press flack did. This provoked sexism charges from crypto-Bushite Campbell Brown at CNN--"shrill" is a word one uses to denounce females only, it seems (though I'd say Rudy Giuliani fits the bill). At least her tsk-tsking was denounced by Paul Begala, in one of his better interventions, who advised against listening to the "far right political correctness thought police". Reid was justified in being angry: Palin crowed that Reid's saying "I can't stand" McCain was "the highest accolade he has received all week". Which isn't saying much for the efforts of those many Repubs who have tried to praise him to the skies.

Actually, though, "shrill" would not be the word I would use to describe Palin's speech. "Snarky", "snide", and "shallow" would be the alliterative adjectives I would choose.

She saved her most snide remarks for Sen. Obama. I am not sure why she (or her speechwriters) felt that she had to denigrate the profession of political organizer, but she went out of her way to do so.

Based on what I've seen so far, I'd call her a dangerous opponent whom we want to send back to the deep freeze of Alaska as soon as possible. Clearly, the only way to do so would be a comprehensive Obama-Biden victory in November (it worked that way for Ferraro's career); even that might not be enough, given the far-right's prevailing love for her.

The good news is that McCain-Palin has thrown itself fully into the extremist right of the ideological spectrum, for which national support is fading. It's unclear at this point if Sarah Barracuda's partisan attacks will strike a positive or negative chord nationally, but it should be clear that the middle is available for Democrats to grab this year. Further, that the Republican ticket--riverboat gambler McCain and extremist stranger Palin--is actually the risky handle to pull in November.