Archive for September, 2008

Despite her messy family situation and nails-on-blackboard speaking voice, Sarah Palin got the GOP base fired up last week. On the final day of the convention, big Johnny McCain told his harrowing tale of prison camp torture for the 23,458th time and, just like that, the repubs are back from the dead. The polls now show McCain ahead by five points, which according to some authorities is a 10 point republican swing from the days leading up to the convention.

As gloomy as it seems for Obama supporters, there are still rays of hope. Gallup suggests: “it may take a few additional days before it is possible to determine if McCain’s modest lead over Obama — developed as a bounce out of the GOP convention — will be sustained, or if it will fade,” and that “voter support levels do not tend to change dramatically during periods of time in which there are no major campaign events.” The upshot as far as democrats are concerned is that McCain’s nice numbers may be short-lived, and that this election may very well come down to who outduels the other in the debates.

With the Sarah Palin frenzy showing no signs of subsiding, it’s not difficult to imagine this year’s vice presidential debates – typically a banal footnote on the campaign trail – as a main event in iteslf. With only three senators with longer tenture than Joe Biden, he is an undisputed congressional titan. Palin, despite her clever rhetorical angling at the convention, is a political neophyte. And herein lies the problem… for the democrats. On paper Biden should wipe the floor with her. Her foreign policy expertise is zero, her economic policy strengths are mostly zero; all her big-picture political experience is, shall we say, off the radar. This may not matter, however, because she has what the political blogs are now calling the “Palin factor.”

The Palin factor is another name for what I formerly called the “Forest Gump phenomenon.” (Clearly, I will be updating my lexicon.) It’s small-town folksiness, down-home goodness, the intellectually soft underdog going up against the book-learnin’ elite. Americans are notoriously suspicious of intelligence. We don’t like being made to feel dumb, and we tend to celebrate stupidity as a reaction. (See: YouTube. See also: the 8-year term of George W. Bush.) What this means for the vice presidential debate is that Joe Biden can bring all the knowledge and experience he likes to the table, but Sarah Palin can easily counter it with a batch of warm cookies. Biden stands to look as condescending and elitist as John Kerry often sounded, even if he is actually sticking to the standard talking points. He says “penalize corporations for using offshore tax havens,” and she says “I’ll do what’s right for the American people!” He says “reinvest in our own infrastructure to create jobs,” and she says “Drill, baby, drill!” You can see how this might get out of hand.

Even so, the [EM]presidential[/EM] debates will be the last big “yawp” heard by voters before the election. And this is where the dems and their candidate stand to win out. Obama is the best political orator I have heard in my lifetime, and has a deft way of sounding simultaneously intelligent [EM]and[/EM] folksy. And he does it without sounding condescending or pandering. His speeches really are the best of both worlds. Hopefully he will be able to outclass McCain in the debates and neutralize the now-dreaded Palin factor.