Yes I think everything has changed, it's a whole new game and I think we can win it. If we can weather the counterattack to come- and it will be a blizzard of negativity- we will win. For the reasons expressed below, I think that most of the attacks, especially on Sarah, will miss the mark because her essential appeal is moral rather than political. The attacks then will succeed only if they can undermine her moral standing.
You are no doubt aware how fond I am quoting myself so let me do so at length here. First, however, modesty compels me to remind the reader that I was the first to proclaim on these threads that Mitt Romney would be the Republican nominee.
These posts describe my thinking as it happened. The first is a post containing a post within it written at the time of the announcement of Palin's selection. The subsumed post, of course, was written some time well before. A coulple more, posted later, amplify those observations. I have subsequently added emphasis. I am afraid it is legnthly and you must scroll through the whole thing, passed several avatars bearing my scowling likeness:
The moral impact of Sarah Palin.
Everyone senses that her nomination somehow fundamentally changes the entire climate of this election. They are right. But not for the reasons they have articulated.
Most of the pundits who support John McCain salute the selection of Governor Palin because of its feminist implications. These Republicans hope that the selection of a female will crystallize the disaffection of the females who supported Hillary Clinton and bring them to McCain. I think that crossover effect will be seen but if it is it will not be because Governor Palin has the right kind of plumbing, it will be because there is a moral dimension to her which will move the hearts of millions of women.
Most of the pundits who oppose John McCain attacked the selection for the governor's alleged lack of experience. Apart from the obvious risk to Obama of blowback which these attacks court, the attacks will fail because they miss the mark. Sarah Palin was not chosen for her experience but for what her experience reveals about her character.
To accurately recognize the bone cracking impact of Sarah Palin on this election one must appreciate the desperate condition of our affairs which the maladroitness of the Bush administration and the venality of our elected Republican representatives and brought us to. Quite simply, we were on the verge of electoral disintegration. I know that many Freepers will cite the fact that McCain was able to stay close in the polls right up to the last night of Obama's convention. It is my belief, and ABC news has reported that it was McCain's belief as well, that the deluge was bearing down on us. To understand why this is so and the dimension of the problems we faced before the arrival of Sarah Pollan, I set forth an earlier post whose context reveals that it was written before the Republicans began their oil drilling vigil in the House. In some places I've added emphasis to facilitate referencing later:
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(subsumed post:)
No one on these boards has been more negative about the GOP prospects for this election than I have. I further confess that I have been negative since before the 2006 elections.
By any measure the prospects for McCain and our party in November are daunting. We have an unpopular president who was both unwilling and incapable of using his bully pulpit to defend his administration and conservative principles. As a result his standing in the polls has deteriorated to a pathetic level. Our Congress is fractured, inarticulate, unprincipled, riddled with RINOs, and even venal. Apart from the electorate's quite normal predisposition to throw the party in power out after eight years, we have a sour economy which the electorate almost always blames on the party which holds the presidency.
Except for the price of oil at the pump and the Democrats' politically providential refusal to permit drilling, we have no surefire issue. The Republican congress has no standing because it has no credibility on issues such as corruption, spending, and managing the government. These were the birthright of the Republican Party they have all been squandered. For example, the Bush administration just announced a projected budget deficit of one half trillion dollars, this will be blamed on the Republican administration even though the Constitution says the spending bills must be initiated in the House which is controlled by the Democrats. Even though Bush cannot spend a penny not authorized by Congress, he will be perceived to be the spendthrift. This perception is a function of a biased media and an inarticulate president who makes Billy Budd sound like an elocution teacher. Likewise, it will be very difficult for Republican House members and senators to claim that the appalling spending, earmarks, and corruption problems in Congress are of Democrat origin when the Democrats need only hold up the shining example of indicted Senator Stevens and his Bridge to Nowhere.
The electoral college grid is a nightmare of potential campaign killing traps. When considered on a state-by-state basis, the Republicans have almost no chance to construct a plausible geography of victory. We have no ability to go poaching anywhere in blue territory with the possible exception of Michigan, but we can expect Obama and his hordes to infiltrate red states especially in the mountains and along the old border states. Ohio is in very serious jeopardy. It is a cliché but accurate to say that no Republican has ever entered the White House without winning Ohio yet we are very likely to lose Ohio this time. Missouri is also very vulnerable, as is Florida. The Old Dominion (gasp) will be at best an uphill struggle if we can inch out a narrow victory. Virginia, like Florida, is representative of a whole class of states where the demographics are overwhelming us. The Southwest is as problematical as the border states. It is not necessary to remind Freepers that the loss of any one of these states is fatal to Republican presidential hopes in view of the fact that there is no realistic chance of taking any additional blue states. The loss of any one of these states will be fatal, yet we lost senatorial elections in every one of these crucial states and in others as well last cycle. Elections, like wars, are not won by playing defense. Rope-a-dope is for dopes. Yet Republicans are increasingly betraying a bunker mentality. The day after this election we might well wake up to find that the Republican Party has been reduced to the citadel of the old Confederacy. Worse, even such states as Florida, Virginia, and, conceivably, North Carolina, might have turned blue.
If one judges the relative enthusiasm of the campaigns, it is not even necessary to further comment. If one assesses fundraising ability, Obama's flip-flop on matching funds tells the story. If one looks at new registrations, party favorability, demographic trends, or other more amorphous standards, Republican candidates are in very deep trouble. Democrats smell blood and Republicans are either running scared or sleepwalking.
As vacuous as it sounds to us, Obama does have a theme, "change," which works for him and with independents. What is McCain's theme? Can it be articulated in one sentence, in only one word? Can anyone articulate a theme for McCain beyond the Iraq war? Can anyone articulate a theme for Congressional and Senate Republicans? Is there any positive Republican, or conservative theme which we can confidently say resonates with the electorate apart from the call to drill for oil?
Against this daunting array of difficulties, our side has very few advantages and a seemingly endless array of difficulties.
Our candidate cannot even command the loyalty of the base of his own party. For many of us he is anathema. He is old, the oldest president ever if elected. He is ideologically unreliable. He is wrong on the important issues which might have turned the election around had he grasped the levers months ago. He is and has been wrong on immigration to the point that he infuriates most of us and has only belatedly and halfheartedly reversed his field on this galvanizing issue. He has been flat wrong on drilling for oil domestically and has only belatedly and halfheartedly reversed his field on this galvanizing issue, afraid to take the whole plunge and advocate drilling in Alaska. He has been wrong on Supreme Court justices and his backtracking has been, again, belated and halfhearted. So we have a candidate who was wrong on the issues which bind his party, or at least the base of his party, and which, even more importantly, provide the greatest hope for game changing issues for the election.
It is necessary for McCain to find some game changing issues because the prospects are even worse than the facts above suggest. It is unnecessary to document the assertion that Democrat Obama is the darling of the mass media. This is almost always the case in a presidential election, but this time it has taken on the nature of a crusade because the candidate is African American. This means that he is, in our world of political correctness, a sacred cow, one whom it is impermissible to criticize. To do so is to run the risk of the charge of bigotry. Hence McCain runs real risks in doing what he must do which is to go after his opponent's disqualifying shortcomings."
[the conventional wisdom respecting the 1980 election is that the country was so disenchanted with the manifest failings of the Carter administration that they were eager for a change of course but they were hesitant to accept Reagan because the mainstream media had told them that he was a dangerous right-wing radical who might blow up the world. The wisdom continues that the country as a whole concluded after watching Reagan in the debates that he was perfectly sane and voted for him in a landslide. In other words, Reagan's threshold was merely to meet the plausibility test.
I submit that Obama faces no higher bar than that. He will be literally carried over the bar on the backs of the media if necessary. This implies that Obama cannot merely be shaded on the issues but he must be thoroughly discredited, morally deconstructed, so that he does not pass the plausibility test.]
. " The press can relive the glory days of the civil rights movement. If they see Obama as The Messiah, they clearly see themselves as John the Baptist. The point of all of this is that, even in a normal election cycle, politics as usual will not work against an anointed African-American Messiah who is the darling of the media. That is because neither logic nor issues will work persuasively with swing voters who decide elections based upon television images. "
[Consider Obama's acceptance speech. Many of us who viewed this speech and saw it only as a reheating of left over socialist bromides called it a failure. But the speech was not designed for us. The speech was not designed to do anything except display Barak Obama as a plausible president. In this goal he manifestly succeeded. Having presented himself as a plausible candidate, he just upped the stakes for McCain. Either McCain must discredit him entirely or find a whole new language for this election. ]
"But we are clearly not in a normal election cycle, we are in a cycle in which the Republicans would face daunting odds even without the African-American Messiah factor. Therefore, John McCain and the Republicans must find a game changing approach or they are simply doomed to lose this election. If one does not accept this premise, one will not wake up from his sleepwalk."
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[return to original post]:
I Ibelieve that John McCain and his advisers had come to exactly the same conclusion: If they did not change the game they were doomed to lose the election. Evidently, ABC's Jan Crawford Greenburg believes that McCain had come to the same conclusion. Here are some of the quotes from his August 29 report describing McCain's motivation:
How Palin Came to the Top of the List
(http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/08/how-palin-came.html)
None of them had what McCain believed he needed to do -- and would have done -- with Lieberman.
McCain wanted to shake up the ticket.
But Pawlenty's flaw -- what cost him the VP -- was that he would not have stirred things up. He was safe, and McCain was not inclined to take the safe route.
I believe that McCain agrees with me, that is as at up to the time he selected Sarah Palin John McCain saw the handwriting on the wall and decided in the words of his liberal antagonists to throw the Hail Mary pass. Sometimes the Hail Mary pass gets caught.
If you analyze all the political science considerations that would fascinate a Paul Begala or a Karl Rove, the selection is a winner on virtually every count except perhaps the issue of experience and even here there are offsets, explanations, and compensations. Obama risks substantial blowback on this issue. But it is not the politics of it which makes this selection transformative, even transcendental.
THE MEANINGFUL SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS SELECTION IS MORAL.
She is the living breathing embodiment of all things good in the conservative tradition. Her baby is a living reproach to the sophistry of a man who cannot discuss when life begins in the context of abortion and who listens to testimony by a nurse describing how she held a dying post abortion baby in her arms without a single syllable apparently penetrating to his soul. When his sordid history in this affair was investigated, he lied.
The abortion issue is only one issue which crystallizes the moral difference between the McCain/Palin ticket and the Obama/Biden ticket. Other issues include, corruption, special interests, spending, and putting country above party. These issues are all made flesh in the person of Governor Sarah Palin. They all resonate in the biography of John McCain. The fit is perfect. The timeliness in this election is also perfect.
McCain now has a unifying theme to his whole campaign: Reform. Reform not change. This means that you change the government not the society. Reform means that you clean up government, you root out corruption. Change means you favor one set of interest groups over another, that you substitute one set of corrupt players for another. Change means that you do something different for change sake. Reform means that you change government to improve it according to an intelligent plan built on a rigorous foundation of integrity.
The Palin selection means that the McCain ticket screams integrity at the voter. The issue is no longer experience but character. I say again: Sarah Palin is not selected because of her experience or in spite of the lies that her experience is insufficient, rather she was selected for what her experience reveals about her character.
Her decision to have a Down syndrome baby means that she is the real deal. Obama betrayed himself in the recent Forum debate on this issue to be a common bullshit artist. McCain declined to accept freedom from torture and solitary confinement out of loyalty to his troops. McCain proved that he is the real deal. I honestly believe that McCain's time in solitary has brought him to a place at the age of 72 where he is utterly removed from the petty political motivations which dominate Obama and Biden to the degree they both resorted to plagiarism to further their careers, Biden being a recidivist, MCCAIN HAS JUST CHANGED THE ELECTION FROM A REFERENDUM ON GEORGE BUSH TO A CALL TO AMERICA TO FIND ITS SOUL.
We can quibble back and forth about the relative weight of our arguments attributing advantage or disadvantage to this selection. For example, I can say that any candidate will be attacked by the left-wing press and it is really a question of her style in front of the cameras that matters. You may be right that her Alaska experience insufficiently prepares them for the ordeal. It could be that her natural ingenuousness inoculates her against cheap tricks. We just have to wait and see.
There is one observation I would like to make which I do not think is a quibble. That is, I question whether she could act as an attack dog and expose Obama for the radical that he is. This is quite a different question from exposing Obama as the nouveau that he is. I have posted before Obama's last speech that merely complaining that Obama is inexperienced or extremely left-wing, avails nothing in this election because Obama, like Reagan in 1980 confronting a hapless Jimmy Carter, need merely show the world that he is plausible. For McCain to win, I believe that Obama must be utterly discredited and morally deconstructed. In other words, he must be exposed for the Marxist, the dangerous radical that he is. This is quite different from whining about whether or not he has sufficient experience. So my question about Palin is, can she bore in like Barney Franks on steroids and unmask Obama for the brilliantly packaged but extremely ugly leftist that he is?
It is a roll of the dice because she is relative unknown, relative to the likes of Romney who had obvious contributions to make in the Midwest and parts of the West where Mormons vote. Romney has television persona and is tried and tested. He can debate and he can campaign and he does not need adult supervision. He has credentials as an executive, as the savior of the Olympics, and as a businessman. Governor Palin has no heavyweight executive experience and very little experience anywhere else except on a fishing boat or as a mother. She is an unknown quantity when it comes to standing up to the mainstream media who are undoubtedly even now planning to make Dan Quayle look like a savant next her.
She's been picked not for her experience but for her transparent integrity and wholesomeness and just plain character. I applaud the choice, but I'm not blind to its deficiencies. She has not been picked because she has vast experience. She has only enough experience to demonstrate her character. But in her case, her relatively little experience is plenty enough to demonstrate character.
I bet the mainstream media never finds one instance of plagiarism in her past.
And another thought :)
My point about abortion is not that it establishes the McCain camp as being against abortion rather Sarah Palin transforms the debate. It unmasks the ugly didacticism of Barak Obama when the issue is not bureaucratic pay grades but the life of a baby. In this case a baby with Down' s syndrome just like the baby whose death was described to Illinois Senator Barak Obama with no evident penetration to his soul. The nomination of Sarah Palin literally embodies a living indictment of the moral corruption of Barak Obama.
So, you are right, not many hairy legged lesbians and Femmi-Nazis who are in the Hillary camp will desert to John McCain. But there are millions of mothers out there who will identify with Sarah Palin and many of them are the undecideds will ultimately decide this election.
In the abortion issue, in the corruption issue, in a Washington outsider issue, Sarah Palin brings a whole new dimension and changes the game-a game which was stacked against McCain in this cycle and one which he can win only if he kicks over the table and changes the rules. That's what he was trying to do with his appointment. It is a risk, but to fail to take this risk is to sleepwalk to almost certain defeat.
Peggy's recent columns make one wonder if she is not auditioning to become the distaff David Gergen.
She does however accurately describe Governor Palin at this point as bulletproof but not essentially because she was so crudely and ineptly libeled. We must understand that Palin's appeal is essentially moral and only secondarily political.
Sarah Palin and her baby are living reproaches Barak Obama. Her very being exposes Obama for the mountebank he is. She is the real deal and so transparent that people instantly recognize her to be authentic. He is a sham and her very presence utterly diminishes him on a moral scale. More, are our moral power illuminates the moral power of John McCain. This the left does not understand. and
Applying this understanding to the Charlie Gibson interview, Sarah was not harmed at all because there was nothing which fundamentally undermined America's judgment that she is authentic and morally true. It does not matter if Sarah Palin is unsure about the Bush Doctrine-so is most of America-that is not the dimension which bonds her to the people. They want to know that her heart is right and that her mind is clear. They know that no one can foresee the challenges the country will face. They are not putting a fact checker one heartbeat away from the presidency. They are putting a human being with a soul in office. They want someone whose character they can trust, because they know that it is character alone that counts when the phone rings at 3 a.m.
Consider that in the context of Obama's remarks about putting lipstick on a pig. The public knows what he was up to and they don't like it. But worse, it scares them because it betrays something about Obama's character which has ominous shadings at 3 a.m.