Sarah Smile

Human Events ^ | 8/29/08 | D. R. Tucker

[MartinaMisc]

While I’m still skeptical of the mentality that Hillary Clinton’s supporters will automatically reject Barack Obama this November, John McCain nevertheless did himself a world of good by selecting Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Palin is not perfect, but she is a solidly pro-life conservative Republican—and McCain desperately needed to have a solid conservative on the ticket in order to have even a remote chance of winning against the Obama juggernaut. Palin’s selection ensures that the Reagan vision will have a place in a McCain Administration—something that will ensure conservative turnout on November 4.

Can the McCain-Palin ticket attract enough independents to win? Let’s hope so. McCain and Palin will come across as a solid center-right combo, the perfect mix of youth and experience. Palin can hold her own in a debate: Joe Biden’s bloviating will be no match for her skills.

Palin respects the past, but offers a break from the image of the past—and in an image-obsessed society, that’s quite important. Remember the mainstream-media prattle that followed George W. Bush’s selection of Dick Cheney in 2000? After the media falsely declared that the Cheney selection was borne of a need to provide Bush with “gravitas” (as though he had none on his own), the Fourth Estate labeled Cheney a bridge to the past, another grumpy old white guy Republican. They can’t do that to Palin. All they can do is run the old anti-Clarence Thomas angle from 1991, this time with gender as the substitute for race.

Gloria Steinem and the rest of the first-wave feminist crew will be dragged out to smear Palin as inimical to women’s interests…the usual garbage. Everything the NOW gang did to Phyllis Schlafly thirty years ago, they’ll do to Palin this week.

[Navy Patriot]

I can't find much to disagree with here, D. R. Tucker has hit a lot of good points, I especially like this, it is the essence of my tagline, which is new this morning before this thread was posted:

Palin is a beauty—not just in a physical sense, but in a political sense as well. She holds out hope that the Republican Party could actually re-embrace fiscal and social conservatism without coming across to non-Republicans as 1980s throwbacks. In Palin, the GOP finally has a chance to actually bring the Reagan vision into the 21st century.

[The people have spoken]

Excellent points, except: “... comparing The Silence of the Lambs to Hannibal.”

I preferred Hannibal.