Sarah Palin, Boadicea of the backwoods
You can understand why McCain picked her, but the Republicans need more than a soap opera, says Alexander Cockburn
Sarah Palin, Boadicea of the backwoods
You can understand why McCain picked her, but the Republicans need more than a soap opera
Sarah Palin gave what one could politely call a passable speech at the Republican convention in St Paul last night, but it's a measure of how desperate both the delegates and the press have been for excitement that they hailed it as 45 minutes worth of consummate rhetorical savagery establishing Governor Palin as a star and leaving the Democratic ticket bloodied by her quips and insults.
Listening to the speeches preceding Palin's one could see the depths of the Republican dilemma and why John McCain made his long-odds gambler's pick of Palin last week, in the immediate aftermath of Obama's triumphant final evening in Denver.
Up to the microphone stepped McCain's erstwhile rivals – Romney, Huckabee and Giuliani – and, aside from ritual homage to the heroism of John McCain, they found
nothing better to do with their time than flail away at Big Government and the liberals in the national press corps.
There's a problem here, of course, which is that Big Government in Washington has been run by the Bush White House for the last eight years, and by a Republican Congress for six of these eight, and by the US Supreme Court, of whom all but two justices were appointed by Republican presidents. Attacks on the elite pinko press always go down well with the rubes but don't really furnish the high-octane fuel necessary to send McCain surging past Obama.
A week ago McCain made the assessment that the Republican Party's Christian base didn't trust him and the Undecideds saw him as just the sort of Washington insider Romney and others were scheduled to deride in St Paul. On the spur of the moment he bet on Palin and tossed a new soap opera into the fall schedule.
Sarah Palin is part of a frontier myth that goes back to the earliest years of the Republic: the beautiful, intrepid 
frontierswoman, shoulder to shoulder with her man, firing at the redskins circling the wagon and dispatching the roaring grizzly with a steady aim as it towers over her infant's cradle.
Tie this to the equally potent myth of the ordinary PTA mom taking on the corrupt good ol' boys running City Hall and the allure becomes irresistible. Throw in her manly husband Todd, equally at home on his snowmobile, in his fishing boat or dandling Trig the baby with Down's Syndrome, top off with Palin's Pentecostal faith and 100 per cent 'No' to abortion for any reason, and you can see why McCain thought Palin worth the throw. Her task: to energise the Republican base and - as a working-class woman - to capture some crucial undecided votes in such battlegrounds as Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Europeans awed that a woman wedded to creationism and a big fan of shooting polar bears from helicopters might be one step away from the Oval Office should remember that the very popular Ronald Reagan – another Western governor inexperienced in
international affairs - sat inside the Oval Office for eight years, having publicly affirmed on more than one occasion that he believed the Final Judgement would occur in his life time, probably in Megiddo.
Like Reagan, Palin has a very good sense of political timing. She outmaneuvered the most powerful politicians in Alaska in four short years and has won the esteem of Alaskans by hitting the oil companies with a higher profits tax and distributing some of the take to the citizenry.
Like most soap operas, albeit a good deal faster, the story line has developed several complexities. There's the custody feud with Palin's former brother-in-law cop which prompted Governor Palin to try to get the man bounced from his job. There's the pregnant elder daughter Bristol and her boyfriend Levi Johnson, a lad who looked, at the Convention, like a deer caught in the headlights of Todd and Sarah's Ford 350 pick-up.
Just like Obama, Sarah has a pastor problem. In her case it's Larry Kroon,
pastor of the Wasilla Bible Church, which is where the Palin family heads on Sunday. Two weeks ago Kroon made his pulpit available to David Brickner, executive director of Jews for Jesus and a man who has said terrorist attacks on Israelis are God's "judgment of unbelief" on Jews who haven't embraced Christianity. Kroon says that Sarah Palin was in church that day.
Soon Palin will be pressed to distance herself from Kroon, the same way Obama was forced to toss his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, over the side. It's one thing to say, as Palin has publicly, that both the Iraq war and the natural gas pipeline she's pressing for (as is Obama) are both God's will, another to urge all Jews to become Christians or court damnation. Jews don't trust Obama which is partly why he picked Joe Biden. Jews don't really trust the woman who might be a heartbeat away from the presidency, since she once sported a Buchanan button, and worships chez Kroon.
Such tribulations lie ahead. This Boadicea of the Backwoods will probably finesse them,
since she's shown she can be politically flexible. As governor of Alaska she's already avoided opportunities to press for anti-gay legislation and for promotion of creationism in schools.
As a political performer her best act so far on the national stage was her more impromptu speech in Ohio when McCain first announced his choice. At St Paul last night her Minnie Mouse-like nasal timbre soon became irksome and she blew the timing on many of the lines in the rambling speech she'd been handed. Will she give the McCain campaign the lift it needs?
If Palin can woo and win voters along the Ohio valley and north of Pittsburgh – exactly where Hillary Clinton did well – she may help McCain pull out a win on November 4. But someone in the McCain camp has to come up with an economic plan. 2008 is a hard year for the Republicans to recover from the second most unpopular president in living memory. Soap operas won’t do the trick. 
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