There is little doubt that the Obama campaign and the Democratic party was caught “flat footed” with the selection of Governor Sarah Palin as Senator McCain’s running mate. The selection also put them in a quandary over how to respond. Initially, the Obama campaign responded with a line that resembled “you must be joking.” But they quickly realized that no one was laughing as they began to realize the gambit that McCain was making. Some dismissed the selection as a cynical ploy to win over the disaffected Clinton base who many perceive inaccurately as being female and over 60. Others only saw the pick as play to secure the base of the GOP. This group is, at least, half right. No doubt, Palin has energized the Christian right wing of the Republican party but her choice is doing much more than that.
No where is the debate over on how to respond to Sarah Palin more evident than over on the liberal blog Talk Left. There a spirited discussion is being waged intra-blog between Jeralyn Merritt and Armando Llorens who blogs as Big Tent Democrat (BTD). Jeralyn Merritt has taken the tact to focus much of her energy on attacking Sarah Palin on almost angle possible devoting numerous posts on why Palin is a dangerous choice for the Vice Presidency. Some of these posts have focused on issues but others have been supersilious. BTD has objected strenuously to latter and modestly to the former. His point of view is:
Personally, I think the Media and Democratic surrogates have done McCain a great favor by aiming all their fire on Sarah Palin. Time to get back to the McCain/Palin = Bush’s Third Term message. It’s been lost for more than a week.
He’s right. The dynamic in the race has changed and Obama’s arguments are being lost in a sea of Palin coverage, both good, bad and especially bad. Sarah Palin is now a factor in the race. While the “bad” may yet augur well for the Obama campaign, the “good” and the “especially bad” will not. By the “good” I mean the impact that Palin is having in certain demographics that are critical to determining who wins the election. By the “especially bad” I mean all the spurious nonsense that many liberal blogs are engaging in. By devoting time, energy and space to pursing stories such as the sale of the Alaska executive jet or on the pregnancy of Bristol, they are not devoting that time, energy and space to the real issues at hand. In short they are their own worst enemy.
Today, Jeralyn dismissed the notion of McCain’s blatant attempt to target working class women voters with his choice of Sarah Palin to be vice president as not finding resonance. She pointed to a Los Angeles Times article and quoted one woman:
“I wanted Hillary to win so bad, but I saw Sarah, and it just didn’t work for me,” said Heckman, taking a break in the empty courtyard of J. Paul’s restaurant in a downtown struggling to revive. “I have no retirement. Obama understands it’s the economy. He knows how we live.”
Fair enough, I do not dispute and never have that Obama would lay claim to a large portion of Senator Clinton’s supporters. But he won’t lay claim to all of them and in my estimation that number is somewhere 4.5 million and 7 million. That’s a sizable hunk of change. While Jeralyn points to the Los Angeles Times, I can point to an article in the UK Telegraph among several that where Palin works is among blue collar Democrats, both male and female.
The Republican presidential candidate signalled his intentions by using his first weekend of campaigning since his party’s convention to launch a political raid into the heart of Reagan-Democrat country, home of the fabled blue collar voters who Mr Reagan captured from the Democrats in the 1980s.
Mr McCain, and particularly Mrs Palin, met with a rapturous reception as they held a rally in Macomb County, Michigan, where pollsters first identified the breed of patriotic conservative, blue collar workers who the McCain camp now believes hold the key to victory in November.
On Friday night in Sterling Heights, Mr McCain’s selection of Mrs Palin appeared to have utterly transformed his campaign and made easier the task of converting Reagan Democrats to McCain Democrats.
Where he once played to a few hundred people, he was greeted by an electrified crowd of 6,000 chanting “Sa-rah, Sa-rah!”, “John Mc-Cain, John Mc-Cain!” and “U-S-A!”
Mrs Palin immediately made explicit how the McCain campaign will take on Democratic candidate Barack Obama in the coming weeks. “We went right from the convention to small town USA,” she said. “It’s true that they grow good people, people who are working hard for America.
You love your country in good times and bad and you’re always proud to be Americans.”
The self-described “hockey mom” wooed her peers, holding up a Detroit Red Wings hockey shirt and describing how her son Track, now a soldier soon to deploy to Iraq, once played for a local high school team. “Michigan, you took care of my boy and now that boy is serving in the US Army and he’s going to take care of you.”
Casting the double act as political outsiders, Mr McCain urged voters to “send a team of Mavericks who aren’t afraid to go to Washington and break a little china”.
With the polls deadlocked after the most exciting convention season in three decades, both Republicans and Democrats are set to wage electoral war on the small town battlefields of middle America.
Stan Greenberg, the pollster who first coined the phrase Reagan-Democrat in 1985, published a new report in Macomb County two weeks ago, which found that Mr McCain has a seven point lead there because disaffected Democrats are uncomfortable with Barack Obama’s inexperience on national security issues and his economic policies. “The Reagan Democrats are back,” it concluded.
Mr Greenberg told The Sunday Telegraph: “These are people who have escaped the city to pursue their version of the American dream. Bill Clinton made it his mission to get them back and he partially succeeded. Reagan Democrats are a metaphor for the challenge Democrats are facing in this election.”
Mr Greenberg added: “Obama has to fight for the older blue collar Catholic voters. If Obama wins Macomb, he takes Michigan and the election.”
Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, said Sarah Palin is now the key to Mr McCain’s chances in Macomb County and the election as a whole. “Small town America has leaned Republican since 1980 but was pulled away to the Democrats by the Republican failures of the last few years. In the 2006 congressional elections small town America voted Democrat.
“In her speech at the convention Sarah Palin cut right to the core of who they are and what they believe: the people who work the hardest and fight our wars. The voters who live in small towns in Missouri and Michigan and Ohio will decide this election.”
Former White House official Jim Nuzzo, an early fan of Mrs Palin, agreed: “This is an absolutely classic class war fight. It’s the toffs in the Obama camp versus the working people. Sarah Palin is John McCain’s bridge to the working class.”
On Friday in Sterling Heights a poster proclaimed: “Sarah You are The One,” a sly dig at Mr Obama’s image. Another read “Real Women are Pro-Life”, a reference to Mrs Palin’s anti-abortion stance.
That point was reinforced by the presence in the crowd of a 40-strong group of nuns in white habits. Sister Thomas Augustin, 44, of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucarist, said: “I think she really speaks for women in a way that Hillary Clinton does not. She loves her husband and her children and I think that disaffected people who were on the fence are going to support her.”
It had been assumed by many commentators that Mrs Palin could not win over those supporters of Hillary Clinton with whom she differs on abortion. But women waving Democrats for McCain posters were highly visible.
Janet Smith, 41, a special education teacher from Flint Township is a registered Democrat who supported Mrs Clinton in the Democratic primary. But she said she was now backing Mr McCain: “I just don’t have a good gut feeling that Obama has what it takes to lead this country. I’m an American first before I’m a party member. McCain is an American first; he’s bringing back patriotism.”
Barbara Fee, 50, another Democrat for McCain who works for a car supplier, said: “I just don’t like Obama. Hope and change are just words. I believe his ideas are socialist. I love Sarah Palin. I like what she’s done and how she’s done it. She’s got spunk.”
Several voters said that Mrs Palin’s arrival on the ticket had made it more palatable to back Mr McCain. Jennifer Raybaud, a 42 year-old small business owner sporting a “Palin has them wailin’” sign, said: “I was going to vote Republican but I feel a whole lot better about it now. Sarah Palin is my age, she has kids. She seems like me.”
Sheri Allard-Pruehs, 50, added: “I love Sarah Palin. If McCain in had picked Joe Lieberman as his running mate I probably wouldn’t have voted at all.”
If that enthusiasm is replicated around the country, Mr McCain could well be taking the oath of office on January 20th.
Senator Kit Bond of Missouri, the state that has picked the president in all but one election over the last 110 years, told The Sunday Telegraph that Mrs Palin’s appointment has energised voters in his state too: “I’m hearing reports of great enthusiasm from my staff all around Missouri. On Sunday I had three women who don’t usually discuss politics in church telling me that they are now very enthusiastic to vote for John McCain.”
Mr McCain, who trails in statewide Michigan polls, was keen to convert the enthusiasm into votes in Sterling Heights: “A little straight talk,” he said. “I need to win Michigan. There’s 60 days left. I need you to get out there and vote.” On Saturday, Mr McCain and Mrs Palin took their message to the swing states of Colorado and New Mexico. Mrs Palin will conduct her first solo campaign event on Monday in Pennsylvania, home state of her vice presidential rival Joe Biden.
Note the emphasis. Some clearly are swayed. But all this is still an aside for the Obama campaign. The real story is that the Obama campaign is unsure of how to proceed: ignore Palin or tackle Palin. BTD is argues for the former and espouses a strategy that is probably the best argument for Obama and that’s McCain equals Bush and more of the same. In this, he has company. Today in Jacksonville’s Florida Times Union, Matt Towery points to the quandary and the frustration facing the Obama campaign:
Those who say there’s no media bias aren’t saying anything right now. They’re laying low.
First, my own minor mea culpa: A week ago, I wrote that Barack Obama had enjoyed little or no bump in the polls from the first nights of the Democratic National Convention. Then came a bump after all, thanks mainly to his high-flying acceptance speech and ringing endorsements from Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Now on to the latest epidemic of media bias.
Obama and David Axelrod, his chief strategist, are privately furious over the endless attacks, snide comments and second-guessing about John McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, and about her unwed daughter’s pregnancy.
Obama’s team is smart enough to know this open faucet flow of condemnation and vitriol has sprouted sympathy - and additional name ID - for Palin among a significant bloc of undecided voters.
The furor also has whacked the sleeping hornet’s nest known as the Republican Party voting base, which until now had been moodily snoozing inside the hive.
Many of them recall Dan Quayle, who was mercilessly and unfairly pilloried by the same kind of media barkers when he was George H.W. Bush’s running mate in 1988. Bush and Quayle won anyway.
But there’s a difference in Quayle’s and Palin’s situations, and it’s a big one: Bush’s handlers took the baton of condescension from media and Democrats and used it to effectively spank their own VP candidate as if he were a naughty kid.
But McCain has circled the GOP wagon that holds the women and children - Palin and her daughter.
Ironically, Quayle was the opposite of the man he was portrayed to be. He was - and is - bright, articulate, funny and totally at ease with just about anybody who thrusts out a hand at him for the shaking.
Is Palin the latest reincarnation of sliced bread? Let’s reserve judgment.
At minimum, she’s spruced up the nights of the living dead known as the 2008 GOP convention. And, yet, a feeling hangs in the air that a second shoe may be about to stomp on Palin and McCain.
Maybe she wasn’t sufficiently “vetted” after all.
But hold on. Did Obama’s team properly vet Democratic VP nominee Joe Biden? As soon as the Obama campaign strummed a tune about McCain being tainted by association with lobbyists, they soon themselves became vulnerable to a similar charge.
But the news media have given barely lip service to the cozy relationship between Biden and his son’s governmental affairs firm.
The firm has as one of its name partners a William Oldaker. He served as general counsel for Ted Kennedy’s 1980 presidential bid.
Oldaker reportedly received funds from Biden for services, even as Oldaker was lobbying Congress on behalf of other clients.
But, hey, no need to investigate.
Instead, many in the media are hellbent on beating the living daylights out of Palin for her every transgression, no matter how small, instead of giving credit to a woman who scrapped her way to the top of a state practically overrun with the same “lunch pail” demographic that media lights claim to respect so much.
Do I think Palin was a great choice? I have no idea. I don’t know enough about her yet. Who can tell if she will give McCain an edge?
But this much I know: Obama and his team are a heap smarter than the half-wits spending their time trying to dig up dirt on a woman who hunts moose and raises kids who misstep on the way to adulthood.
Obama knows that this is just asking for trouble for the Democrats with an American public that is just “unsophisticated” enough not to be gulled by the sophisticates.
Throw in that McCain is standing by his woman, and what you have is anything but Dan Quayle, Part Two.
Not that I am in the business of providing advice to the Obama campaign, but if Obama wants to win then making Sarah Palin an issue is a losing proposition. BTD, however, is and he’s right.
