Gloss may wear off Republicans’ ‘lipstick-on-a-pitbull’ convention moment
John McCain’s speech was thin gruel after the raw red meat of his running-mate, and the party may yet run out of impetus
On Wednesday evening, as Sarah Palin was preparing to take the stage at the Republican convention, a knot of teenagers was standing on a footbridge over the highway leading into MinneapolisSt Paul with a homemade sign that read: “Obama ’08”.
Had they nothing better to do? “It’s the first time that I’ve felt like this,” explained Ligeia Baumhofer. “Barack Obama has got us excited about politics.” A policeman told them to move their sign inside the railings and advised them to leave but they stayed to wave at car drivers honking support.
There is phenomenal passion being shown by his supporters and, while most polls point to a tight presidential contest, some evidence suggests that the Republicans are falling into an “enthusiasm gap”. A CBS survey this week suggested that 55 per cent of those backing Mr Obama were feeling more energised – and therefore likely to vote – than usual, compared with 35 per cent for John McCain.
The Republican convention in St Paul had begun badly, Monday’s proceedings being wiped out by Hurricane Gustav before Tuesday evening’s events drifted from dreary to dull. Joe Lieberman, who eight years ago was the Democratic vice-presidential pick, was there to back his friend Mr McCain in the spirit of bipartisanship.
The Xcel Energy Centre in St Paul was not living up to its name. Across the river in Minneapolis, Congressman Ron Paul was holding a rally for 10,000 libertarian-leaning Republicans but inside the convention hall itself there were rows of empty seats.
Tirso del Junco, an 83-year-old Cuban exile at his twelfth convention, conceded that the Democrats had put on a better show in Denver. Walter Hatch, 23, gazed around the emptying party that had been put on for the Florida delegation and said: “The crowd here is mostly old – they probably want to be in bed by 10pm.”
All that was before Mrs Palin took the stage to deliver a speech on Wednesday night that set the convention alight. Her imperfections and inexperience, as well as the public spectacle and humiliation being endured by her family, only added fuel to her fire: conservative Republicans love nothing more than roaring to the defence of one of their own.
“I feel like I have been electro-charged,” said Bill Seller, a delegate from Missouri. “This is suddenly a dream ticket. She is amazing and it has completely changed our view of McCain. For the first time, I really think they can win this thing.”
Eric Koch, an Indiana congressman, told reporters that when his delegation heard that Mrs Palin was the vice-presidential pick, “they cheered. There were tears in people’s eyes, a sense of victory.”
A delegate from Ohio had found it difficult to eat or concentrate since the speech, so excited was she by it. Steve Schmidt, Mr McCain’s strategist, said: “The race has changed. She has energised and galvanised and breathed new life into the Republican Party that none of us thought was possible.”
Mrs Palin will galvanise the conservative base. As in 2000 and 2004, the Religious Right will be out distributing leaflets about abortion and gay marriage, evangelical churches will run buses to the polling places, Talk Radio will be back on side.
The Republican nominee knows that such support is not enough to defeat Mr Obama on November 4. His campaign manger, Rick Davis, told The Washington Post that the Republican Party’s deep unpopularity after eight years of President Bush means “right now if the election were held today we probably don’t have as many votes as Barack Obama”.
This goes some way to explain why, in his own speech on Thursday night, Mr McCain offered up such thin fare to delegates who had feasted on the raw red meat served by Mrs Palin at the convention 24 hours before.
His audience often appeared subdued as he said: “I don’t work for a party. I don’t work for a special interest. I don’t work for myself. I work for you. Instead of rejecting good ideas because we didn’t think of them first, let’s use the best ideas from both sides. Instead of fighting over who gets the credit, let’s try sharing it. This amazing country can do anything we put our minds to. I will ask Democrats and Independents to serve with me.”
He even had nice words for Mr Obama, the target of Mrs Palin’s sharpest arrows on Wednesday, saying “much more unites us than divides us” and that the Democrat bidding to be America’s first black President had “my respect and admiration”.
The big difference was that he had the “record and scars” of a lifetime’s service to prove his readiness to reach out across the political divide, while “Senator Obama does not”.
But it was a clunky, double-decker of a speech. Here was Mr McCain arguing he was more experienced and ready to heal “partisan rancour” – when he had, by necessity, chosen a stridently right-wing running-mate with a record of just 18 months in state-wide office.
He devoted just one paragraph in his speech to the agenda of social conservatives, as he talked of his belief in “faith, service, a culture of life, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and judges who dispense justice impartially and don’t legislate from the bench”.
Instead, he spent more time discussing his robust foreign policy, as well as plans to reduce taxation, create jobs, promote energy independence, tackle corruption and improve education.
He tried hard to combine his appeal as a maverick with that of Mrs Palin, saying how proud he was to have introduced her to the country, adding: “I can’t wait until I introduce her to Washington. Let me offer an advance warning to the big-spending, do-nothing, me-first, country-second Washington crowd: change is coming.”
Yet you could almost hear the rivets grinding as he attempted such contortions. Mr McCain’s strategists insist that Mrs Palin has an “Every-woman appeal” that can extend beyond the base to blue-collar voters and women. Indeed, her speech was littered with references to hockey moms and joining the PTA – while abortion was touched on only in coded fashion as she talked of giving birth four months ago to “a perfectly beautiful baby boy named Trig” whom she knew had Down’s syndrome.
But it is more likely to be remembered for the “lipstick-on-a-pitbull” ferocity that got the Republican Right worked up into a frenzied froth on Wednesday. Her small-town life in Alaska is a much wilder place than the swing-state suburbs where this election will be won or lost.
Mrs Palin may be compelling but she is palpably different. Susan Manyoky, one of the Alaskan delegates, rejected the caricature of her state as a place where people had little else to do but drink, get pregnant and shoot moose. “We’re Republicans and we’re not promiscuous,” she said primly before veering off-message a little to add: “But it is true, we do get to hunt moose and chop them up in in our basements.”
Source:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4687701.ece
