Sarah Palin, the Real Thing from Alaska

At first blush Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) seems like an unlikely choice as running mate for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

But then you get to watch her speak after McCain’s introduction today in Dayton, OH.

You immediately realize that she is a practiced and confident public speaker. And next you get the feeling that she likes being up on the stage. Unlike some other politicians we all know.

Then you run the YouTube session of her playing a talking head on Larry Kudlow’s cable show, and you realize that she ain’t no neophyte.

In fact, here’s a nickel that says she’s better when she’s off the prompter than the Great Orator himself.

Then there’s Fred Barnes’ report on Palin from last year, when he told the story of her remarkable rise in Alaska politics, marked by remarkable courage and willingness to take on the corrupt Republican establishment. For guys worried about her cojones:

In the roughly three years since she quit as the state’s chief regulator of the oil industry, Palin has crushed the Republican hierarchy (virtually all male) and nearly every other foe or critic. Political analysts in Alaska refer to the "body count" of Palin’s rivals. "The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah," says pollster Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign.

I don’t care what you say. It takes a ferocious political talent to do that.

No wonder that hard-core Republicans like me are fizzing with excitement. This babe maybe could take prisoners. After all, her nickname in high school was “Sarah Barracuda.”

Obama Wows His Supporters, At Least

Obama supporters seem as pleased as punch this morning after his acceptance speech at Invesco Field last night. It was indeed a historic moment as an African American accepted the presidential nomination of a major political party for the first time, 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech.

But as a conservative, I was encouraged. All along, I have been wondering if Obama had a rabbit to pull out of the hat, whether he had a passing gear that he hadn’t yet shown us.

The answer came through last night. He doesn’t. He presented himself as a solid New Deal/Great Society/Multiculti Democrat. No real break with the past. No real change, chaps.

And he may have made a tactical mistake by criticising John McCain so frequently. It seems as though The One spots that McCain has been releasing over the last few weeks have gone home, and Obama is miffed with the criticism. So that means that the wiley tactician is controlling the game.

One more thing. Obama reprised the “On Your Own” theme that Hillary Clinton raised last year, and which I criticized here.

What are you talking about, Senator? Let’s look at the projected numbers on government spending for FY 2009, the first year you would be in office.

• Pensions: $891.1 billion
  
  
• Health Care: $958.2 billion
  
  
• Education: $873.7 billion
  
  
• Defense: $806.1 billion
  
  
• Welfare: $467.7 billion
  

On your own? We, the American people who pay taxes, are shelling out for a little shy of one trillion dollars a year each on Pensions, Health Care, Education, and half a trillion a year on Welfare.

If after all that money, every year, Americans are still “on their own” then maybe it is time to deep-six the whole notion of the welfare state that you and your pals support and find another way of caring and sharing in our American nation.

Dems Just Don't Like Free Speech

First it was the outrage over the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. How dare they attack Sen. John Kerry (D-MA). Then it was conservative talk radio. What was needed, Democrats agreed, was to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

Earlier this week, the Obama campaign vowed to make a criminal complaint against a group, the American Issues Project, that aired a commercial criticising Obama’s association with radical bomber Bill Ayers.

Today, the Obama campaign instructed its supporters to inundate with phone calls and emails a Chicago radio station’s interview of Dr. Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who has been researching the relationship between Barack Obama and radical Bill Ayres in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. At National Review they have this to say:

Obama supporters risibly complain that shining a light on the Obama/Ayers relationship is a “smear” and smacks of “guilt by association.”

That’s what liberals always say when they want to shut down somebody’s free speech.

The trouble is that liberals have convinced themselves that Swift-boat type attacks are beyond the pale, vicious smears that should be suppressed. Well, everyone feels like that when their ox is being gored. What liberals don’t get is that they are as good as anyone in the smear business. Maybe better.

But as I’ve said before: Go ahead liberals. Make my day. The more liberals try to shut down the opposition, the more they are going to fire up conservatives.

Bill is Still the Champ

What else can you say after Day 3 of the Democratic National Convention? President Bill Clinton still has his chops. He can still give a speech that keeps his listeners in the palm of his hand. What a talent! What a waste.

You can keep your John Kerrys and your Joe Bidens. They are just ordinary politicians doing their rants. Kerry showed that he was still angry that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that had the nerve to accuse him of lying just as he, over thirty years before, had accused American servicemen of atrocities. He is too humorless to understand nemesis and poetic justice. And Joe Biden? Well, he did a workmanlike job of roughing up the opposition. But who cares?

Of course, the experience of listening to Bill Clinton brought the Nineties back. What a slippery chap he is. How well he can take statistics—jobs for example—and twist them around.

Clinton boasted that in the Nineties he created 24 million jobs and in the 2000s Bush only created 5 million. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistic Household Survey there were 122 million Americans employed in January 1993 and 138 million employed in January 2001. That’s 14 million jobs, Mr. President. Then in July 2008 there were 148 million jobs. That’s 10 million new jobs since President Bush took over. Considering that there was a recession that began pretty well exactly as President Bush took office, I’d say that wasn’t too bad.

But She Just Isn't Likeable

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) did a workmanlike job in her speech last night on the second day of the Democratic National Convention. But she didn’t make you want to like her. She evidently appeals to women of a certain age for whom the defining aspects of life are the Seneca Falls convention and the Nineteenth Amendment. They are the women who believe in the glass ceiling and male chauvinism.

(Back in the 1970s the women in my office thought it would be a wonderful idea to give me a Male Chauvinist Pig tie. What can you do with that sort of thing except be a good sport?)

Pundits like Michael Barone are saying that the speech was a good preparation for 2012. Maybe it was. Or maybe Hillary Clinton will just be a Senate institution by then.

But Hillary Clinton just isn’t likeable. And that’s like starting First and Ten with a ten yard penalty when you are playing presidential politics.

Certainly if you look back over the last several presidential races, it is clear that the likeable guy always wins.

At least Hilllary Clinton outperformed the Keynote speech. That effort by Virginia Senate candidate Mark Warner was a technocratic yawn.

The big takeaway of the night was the Karl Rove line, issued on Fox News’ Strategy Room. Obama has to show that he is up to the job, said Karl, after a learned disquisition on post-convention poll bounces. What really bothers independent voters is that they just don’t think that Obama is up to the job.

But I wish that they still ran the conventions like a convention, with reports from the Platform Committee, with a formal placing of names in nomination, and a formal roll-call vote. Politics isn’t a variety show. Or at least, not quite.

Ted's a Liberal and Michelle's a Mom

That’s what we learned at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night.

It was good to see Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) out there making what is probably his last major national speech. He gave us vintage Ted, railing at us in his hortatory style, and we were grateful for it, as the great liberal lion of our generation enters a twilight of age and disease. We honor Uncle Teddy in the autumn of his life.

Michelle Obama did what she needed to do, and did it well. She spoke as a loving daughter, sister, wife, and mother. Some have criticised this—and he knows who he is—as Michelle the Stepford Wife. Well, of course. Michelle Obama had to erase the early, angry Michelle, the stereotypical angry black liberal, and she did.

Conservatives should not sneer at this but take comfort. The fact is that when Democrats talk directly to the nation they must put aside their ugly liberal anger and their nasty liberal issues, and speak to the eternal verities.

The eternal verity for a woman is love. A woman is nothing without love, nothing without her relationships. Career, glass ceilings, and all that political tommy-rot, they are nothing. Even after a generation of non-stop feminist agitation from the heights to the obscurest corners of American life the wife of a presidential candidate still has to give a speech about herself as a lover, a lover of family, of husband, and of children.

That is not something to grumble about. It is something to celebrate.

Dems Cheer Criticism of Teacher Unions!

Have our Democratic friends reached an inflection point on eduction?

Mickey Kaus reports the unimaginable from the Democratic National Convention. He went to an education event and expected the usual EdBlob talk about change, accountability, and resources. But not a word about the teachers’ unions.

Was he wrong! People started talking about how the adults’ agenda always wins against the children’s agenda.

Then Cory Booker of Newark attacked teachers unions specifically—and there was applause. In a room of 500 people at the Democratic convention!

Then Booker went on.

The party would "have to admit as Democrats we have been wrong on education." Loud applause!

Well, this is good news, of course. Even though I have to admit to sour grapes. For thirty, forty, fifty years, Democrats have been standing in the school-house door blocking reform. And now, all of a sudden they say, OK. Change of plan. Now we are the party of education reform!

That’s when we have to remember that it’s not the adults and our memories of the political battles of the last generation that matter. What matters is the children.