The Vig

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers cuts through all the garbage and finds a truth.

I thought Palin’s performance at the debate was downright embarrassing and on top of that I have to read this clown’s blog, stating more or less that Palin gave him an erection? Little starbursts my ass. Here’s what I thought when Palin “dropped” that first wink at us: “Did she just wink at us like she was America’s cocktail waitress?” Rich Lowry is on the verge of slapping Sarah Palin on the ass and asking her for another of those fantastic whiskey sours.

Well kiss my grits!

Watching her, I can only think of the Kevin Kline movie Dave, the one where the president has a stroke mid-coitus and is replaced by a look-alike who becomes a puppet of the real president’s chief-of-staff.  The right believes that every word that falls from her lips is inspired by Saint Ronnie and therefore she herself is guided by his spirit.  Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.  From the first moment after she was selected, she’s been surrounded by the very insiders she spent 90-minutes railing against Thursday night.  This is change?  Please.

But the right choose to believe the lie.  At least for now.

It’s been ten days since McCain announced his choice for vice president.  She has yet to face the press and may not for another two weeks.

Sullivan suggests she’s more of a chihuahua.

The strategy here is actually pretty cagey on the part of the Republican machine.  Rather than risk sending her out to make some sort of a gaffe, why not send the press into a tizzy and have them make the gaffes instead.  the reverse-double-whammy.  Genius, if you think about it.

Meanwhile, the propaganda machine will keep churning out junk like this.  And when that doesn’t work, just fill the press’ mouths with words.

You’re going to hear a couple of pro-Palin arguments bubble to the top over the next few weeks.  The first is that she’ll be surrounded (insulated?) by some really smart advisors.  They’ll do the thinking for her.  If you think back, one of my major concerns in 2000 was the fact GWB seemed sort of dumb.  The “he’s surrounded himself with really smart people (Rumsfeld, Condi, Ashcroft, Gail Norton!, Mel Martinez, Christie Whitman…you get the idea)”, so if he finds himself out of his depth, he can just consult with one of them.  That was good enough for me in 2000.  It doesn’t hold water this time around.

The second is actually a question rather than an argument.

Who vetted Barack Obama?

This is an RNC talking point which, when repeated by a member of Oregon’s delegation to the Republican convention last week, went unchallenged by Bob Miller.  Who vetted Barack Obama?  The same people who vetted Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee.  They’re called voters.  We’ve had over a year now to get to know Obama.  He’s been run through both the Clinton wringer and Hannity’s.  And he survived it all.  So don’t give me this “Obama was never vetted” crap.

The longer they hide Palin, the more I think the Republicans risk this thing coming back and biting them in the rear.

Mudflats says Sarah Barracuda is heading home for the next week.  If true, this will be a grave mistake.  In the next seven days, she will at least need to spend an hour getting massaged by Hannity.  And if she the McCain campaign is smart, she’ll need to spend another half-day doing phone interviews with the Lars Larsons of the world.  Doing these from Juneau instead of Columbus, where she would be taking her message directly to the voters they need, would be asinine.

A week out of the spotlight may wipe out her advantage after her week in St. Paul.

Support from other Americans and Alaskans is needed also to move forward with the proposed bridge between Revillagigedo and Gravina islands, she said. “People across the nation struggle with the idea of building a bridge because they’ve been under these misperceptions about the bridge and the purpose,” said Palin, who described the link as the Ketchikan areas potential for expansion and growth.
Ketchikan Daily News August 9, 2006

“Ketchikan desires a better way to reach the airport, but the $398 million bridge is not the answer,” said Governor Palin. “Despite the work of our congressional delegation, we are about $329 million short of full funding for the bridge project, and it’s clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island,” Governor Palin added. “Much of the public’s attitude toward Alaska bridges is based on inaccurate portrayals of the projects here. But we need to focus on what we can do, rather than fight over what has happened.” The Department of Transportation has approximately $36 million in federal funds that will become available for other projects with the shutdown of the Gravina Island bridge project. Governor Palin has directed Commissioner Leo von Scheben to review transportation projects statewide to prepare a list of possible uses for the funds, while the department also looks for a more affordable answer for Gravina Island access.
The governor’s official website. 9/21/2007

“She didn’t make the announcement here in Ketchikan. She didn’t alert local mayors that she’d made the decision. She didn’t notify Ketchikan’s Representative or Senator, or even the Congressional delegation, apparently, that a decision was made and an announcement was on its way. No, the effective end of three decades of effort towards a bridge was announced in a press release launched – perhaps coincidentally – early in the day to meet the East Coast media deadlines.”

Ketchikan Daily News Editorial, 10/11/07 - on Palin’s abrupt decisions to cancel the bridge funding by sending out a 5am press release to hit East Coast news cycles.

Fast forward to last night…

“I told the Congress “thanks, but no thanks,” for that Bridge to Nowhere.  If our state wanted a bridge, we’d build it ourselves.”

So now Alaskans never wanted the bridge?  Weird.  But she still took the money Congress had already given her.  Nice.  I wonder what that went toward instead.

She’d used that line a time or two over the weekend, but was shocked when she went back to it again last night.  The people of Alaska know what she said.  And they know that when the political winds shifted, so did she.

That speech last night scared the heck out of me because it was delivered well and with a smile.  But it’s a long time between now and election day.  You get the feeling that some of those images and quotes could come back to haunt them come mid-October.

Apparently I saw a different speech than everyone else.  I mean I saw the same speech, it was shrill and after 8:00 (11:00 EDT) it went George Costanza “one too far”.  But for the most part, I think she did exactly what she needed to do.  She proved she could read a teleprompter.  She also proved that she didn’t have two-heads.  And she got off a couple of good one-liners.  The hockey mom-pitbull-lipstick line was perfect.  Sullivan thought it looked like an American Idol final.  FiveThirtyEight thought it was over the top.  And this high school forensics coach wants to pull his hair out.

Me?  I think she knocked it out of the park.  Part of her advantage during the last three days is it gave people on all sides time to project and focus that which they wanted to see.  The base sees one of their own while the left sees a backwoods rube.  Boss Hogg in a banana clip.  Neither version is 100% correct, of course, but that’s how it broke down.  The fact that she’d been underground for the last 72-hours or so only helped to foster this thing.  It’s like those last few days before the new summer blockbuster comes out.  You’ve been reading Ain’t It Cool and you’ve been reading Rotten Tomatoes.  You even text Aaron Duran, who’s seen the movie but is forbidden to tell you anything about it.

So it was tonight.  I tuned in just to see if she could read the teleprompter without fumbling over herself.  The answer?  Yes. She. Can.  From the very first minute, I knew Obama and Biden were in trouble.  Deep, deep trouble.  She’s good.  She’s really good.  And she’s going to cause the Dems fits in Ohio and Pennsylvania.  These are the two states, you’ll recall, that went for Hillary on the backs of the “working class” voters.  She’s one of them.  Big time.  And they’re going to love her.

The dynamic of the campaign has reversed as of tonight and it’s going to take a few days to see what damage has been done.  We’ll know by probably Monday or Tuesday of next week.

Here’s the plus-side, though.  Obama is nowhere in sight right now.  And that’s as it should be.  Candidates generally stay low during their opponents’ convention.  So they no doubt watched the speech tonight and are planning their counter.  In the end, I have a feeling Palin is going to look like a yip dog nipping at Obama’s heels and what looked viscious tonight will turn out to just be sad in a few weeks.  There’s a reason Obama overcame this crap during the primaries.  I think people, for the most part, are tired of it.

All that said, it will still come back to Ohio and Pennsylvania.  As of tonight, Ohio is barely tilting toward Obama while he leads in Pennsylvania by about 8 points.  If Obama can pick-up both of those states, the election is over.  If she can tilt just one of them back toward McCain, then things get interesting real fast.  Ohio, a red state for the last two elections, is most likely.  Ohio, by the way, has gone in the winning column every election since 1964.  You want to win?  You win Ohio.

Am I scared tonight?  Yeah, a little.  Fortunately there’s still miles to go before the election.  Oh how I wish Tim Russert could have gotten an hour alone with her.  Instead we’re going to have to settle for a tired Tom Brokaw and Sean Hannity’s bitch, George Stephanopoulos.  We’ll make do with what we have, I guess.

I’m still confiedent, but this thing just got a whole lot closer.

I got into blogging by answering a forum post on O-Live back in 2004.  Kevin “Velveeta” Cosgrove originally brought two of us in to give our insights into the election and blog our thoughts in what turned out to be near real time.  My partner was David B. Wright.  He’s now writing at TwoPennies.

David made up his mind fairly early on that he would be voting for Kerry.  I still had a lot of post-Limbaugh baggage to overcome and didn’t make up my mind until late-October that things had to change.

He doesn’t post much these days, given the fact he’s now got a big boy job down in Las Vegas which allows him to have both a mortgage and a nice sled.  But every now and then he’ll pop-up with some thoughts on what’s going on in politics.  He’s made no secret he’s voting for McCain this time around, partly out of dislike for Obama, but mostly because he prefers the idea of divided government.  Fine.

I asked him yesterday whether Palin changed his calculus at all.  The answer?

McCain could have picked a ham sandwich (to paraphrase) as his running mate, and I still would have to vote for him for the good of the country.  That I happen to like him, and distrust Obama, makes that choice easier.  That he made a questionable pick for VP is a bit troublesome, but I understand entirely why he made that choice.  I’d have chosen differently, myself, but that’s OK.

Gulp.

McCain’s choice, his first true executive decision, shows an impulsive, risk taking side that I don’t think this country can handle during this time of both domestic and worldwide uncertainty.  In my mind it truly is more of the same.  And while I sympathize with Wright’s idea that government is at its best when its divided, I don’t think we can allow a religious zealot to be this close to the seat of power.  Especially post-Bush/Cheney.  This was the argument against Huckabee, you’ll recall.  Two years, or even four, of one-party rule will not bring this country down.  The Dems are particularly afraid of their own shadows and will not stray too far from the middle, no matter their rhetoric.

The question on everyone’s minds now is how many Davids are out there?  We’ll know sooner rather than later.