WELL, that felt like a convention. As much as I abhor almost everything these people stand for, I have to say that I found that I was walking out of the Excel Center in St. Paul on Wednesday night with some adrenaline coursing through my body. Tuesday night I felt like I was leaving a funeral home.
These were two excellent convention speeches by Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin. They were well-written and very well delivered. With regard to Giuliani, that was no surprise at all to me. I’ve seen him give speeches since about 1988. I know what he’s capable of. He can parse some of the most credible and authoritative demagoguery of anyone I’ve ever seen. His mastery of it tonight only left me all the more confused as to why this talent, which has been in his bones seemingly from birth, appeared to elude him during the very months he was seeking the presidency.
It was fine stage management, too, to flow straight from Giuliani to Palin, without a pause for the talking heads to get in there and talk about the proceedings for three minutes. The design was surely to make Palin feel at ease as she took the stage before an already adoring crowd.
Palin started out visibly nervous, but it didn’t take her long to warm up at all. She gave the crowd absolutely everything it wanted, and her speech was peppered with effective zingers. Her lines of praise for McCain were just right. Her testimonials about her family were tonally on. Her criticisms of Obama and Biden were tremendous crowd pleasers. Her digs at Obama’s career as a community organizer were probably the most effective: “A small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” Even I can’t say that wasn’t a good one.
In the short term, Palin certainly saved her candidacy. On Wednesday afternoon, news broke of the off-camera discussion between Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy, two famed GOP advisers and media savants, who were caught saying that they thought Palin was a disaster and the race was, as Noonan put it, “over.” This Irish grave dance was huge news. No Republican had really gone after Palin on the record before, and the exposure of this conversation threatened to open the floodgates. But Palin’s performance was good enough to prevent that, and to allow Murphy and Noonan to pull a volte face and get back on the team. Palin also, in the short term, got the delegates firmly and implacably on her side. Her line about the media was more deft than one had reason to expect and cleverly delivered: “I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion. I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this great country.” She will pay for that line, but it did her good tonight.
But here’s the thing she did not accomplish, I don’t think, in the long term. This was billed in advance as a “policy” speech, and it was decidedly not that. Of the speech’s 38 minutes, she spent about nine or 10 minutes talking about energy policy, and even then in only the most platitudinous tropes. In policy terms, that was it. A few shots at the Democrats for the old “they’ll raise your taxes” bugaboo, but not one word on what she and McCain would really do to improve the economy.
I size it up like this. Let’s say I were a laid-off, $45,000-a-year worker in Ohio. If I were sitting on an olio of right-wing resentments, about elitist liberals and the media and this and that kind of thing, I may have fallen in love with her. She was that compelling as a human being. But if I weren’t sitting on those resentments, I’d have been asking myself, “Uh, what exactly did she say to me, to address my concerns?” Barack Obama was hammered a million and one times for allegedly failing to do exactly this. But compared to Palin on this score he has been FDR a thousand times over. Palin’s argument tonight wasn’t an argument, it was an arrow aimed at the viscera: If you relate to what I’m telling you about the media and these liberals, join the team. If you don’t, then ... well, it seems that neither she nor the person who wrote the speech had the imagination to envision those people. One last cautionary note to conservative serum-drinkers, or to liberals terrified now that she’s impossibly formidable. Remember how things change in 24 or 48 hours. We’re still sitting on a powder keg of Palin administration and family potential scandals. One could break Friday, and suddenly, the speech would be forgotten instantly. Or one might not. But whatever the case, the speech will fade.
