Ahead, on my right, I saw the Alaska Right to Life (RTL) booth, where a poster caught my eye, taking my breath away. It featured the sweetest baby girl swathed in pink, pretend angel wings fastened to her soft shoulders.

“That’s you, baby,” I whispered to Piper, as I have every year since she smiled for the picture as an infant. She popped another cloud of cotton candy into her mouth and looked nonchalant: Still the pro-life poster child at the State Fair. Ho-hum.

Well, I still thought it was a nice shot, as I did every time I saw it on its advertisements and fund-raiser tickets. It reminded me of the preciousness of life.

It also reminded me of how impatient I am with politics.

A staunch advocate of every child’s right to be born, I was pro-life enough for the grassroots RTL folks to adopt Piper as their poster child, but I wasn’t politically connected enough for the state GOP machine to allow the organization to endorse me in early campaigns.

Time and again, Palin uses her large family for political purposes, and then complains that they’re “off limits” when she decides they’re under attack. We’ve seen it with the use of her son Trig–Palin put him on national TV at the 2008 Republican National Convention, and has occasionally accused liberals of wanting to kill him. We’ve seen it with Bristol Palin, whose pregnancy became a national story, and with Track Palin, whose military service Palin has referred to again and again. But it seems like Piper Palin’s star turn for Alaska Right to Life was the first political deployment of a Palin family member.

Train-wreck stuff, but it’s important to add that Jenkins isn’t really a journalist. When he and a Boston radio host did a “gotcha” interview with Janeane Garofalo, Jenkins repeatedly claimed that he was a “blogger” instead of admitting that he worked for Fox, which would have, presumably, gotten a different reaction out of the celebrity he was filming. So no organization’s under any obligation to pretend he’s a real member of the press.

–

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[F]ollowing a vice presidential acceptance speech viewed live by more than 40 million people, [Alaska Gov. Sarah] Palin is viewed favorably by 58 percent of American voters…. [only] 37 percent hold an unfavorable view of the self-described hockey mom. The figures include 40 percent with a Very Favorable opinion of Palin and 18 percent with a Very Unfavorable view. … A week ago, 67 percent had never heard of her.

The new data also shows significant increases in the number who say McCain made the right choice and the number who say Palin is ready to be president.

The voters aren’t done.

Here’s the kicker:

Perhaps most stunning is the fact that Palin’s favorable ratings are now a point higher than either man at the top of the presidential tickets this year. As of Friday morning, Obama and McCain are each viewed favorably by 57 percent of voters. Biden is viewed favorably by 48 percent.

There’s plenty of time for Palin to stumble, or for people to fill in the blanks about her and change their opinion. But it’s not exactly like she’s been floating on glowing press coverage or a perfect roll-out, either. As TWI has documented, her record is troubling and her speeches thus far have been filled with falsehoods.

The voters, however, like her on Week One. Now that we’ve seen Sen. John McCain’s dismal acceptance speech for the GOP presidential nomination, it’s fair to say she saved the Republican National Convention for him.

Sen. John McCain (Photo by Lauren Victoria Burke, wdcpix.com)

St. Paul–Darkness had fallen over the city when Sen. John McCain stepped out from the shadow created by his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, when she lashed out at the Democrats and the media and intellectual elites the night before. He did so as a man declared politically dead in July 2007 when, facing dismal poll numbers and a campaign bleeding money, he let most of his staff go. Now resurrected, McCain delivered an acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination that reinforced his image of the elder statesman from the party in power that would keep America the great power in the world.

“I’m very proud to have introduced our next vice president to the country,” McCain said. “But I can’t wait until I introduce her to Washington. And let me offer an advance warning to the old, big-spending, do-nothing, me-first, country-second Washington crowd: change is coming.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

McCain, 72, had arrived in the Twin Cities with much to prove. The self-described maverick has never been a favorite among the conservative base of his own party — despite repeated overtures. His past ability to work with some of the most liberal senators, like Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), had only increased the ire of many influential members of the GOP. That both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s almost and current vice-presidential nominees, have called him a friend, only reinforced his lack of conservative cred among the GOP base.

But the Republican Party could be ready to overlook all this. “They’re past their differences,” said Sara Taylor, a former White House political director in the Bush administration. “You can see the excitement in the hall. They understand national security is going to matter a lot for the country — and they understand John McCain is part of that future.”

McCain’s selection of the uber-conservative Palin as his running mate did much to quell the conservative backlash. But now it was his turn to prove that the man eviscerated by George W. Bush and Karl Rove during the 2000 South Carolina primary was truly one of them.

McCain’s task last night was to energize the core of the party and reach out to independents — in the same fashion Obama had done last week. He would have to do what he had regularly mocked his opponent for doing: For one night he would have to do what he’s least good at — speak before a large audience and rock the house.

But more precarious was the lingering legacy of George W. Bush. McCain had to play to the base while disowning the legacy of Bush. Even as he acknowledged Bush at the opening, McCain had to make a quick pivot away from president with the lowest poll rating in U.S. history.

How in God’s name does the party in power become the party of change? And how could McCain restore a Republican brand that’s become synonymous with corruption, urban neglect and a war policy gone terribly wrong?

“I fight to restore the pride and principles of our party,” McCain said, echoing words he’s used on the stump. “We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us. We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust when, rather than reform government, both parties made it bigger. We lost their trust when, instead of freeing ourselves from a dangerous dependence on foreign oil, both parties and Sen. Obama passed another corporate welfare bill for oil companies. We lost their trust, when we valued our power over our principles.

“We’re going to change that,” he said. “We’re going to recover the people’s trust by standing up again for the values Americans admire. The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan is going to get back to basics.”

McCain had a bigger opponent to overcome last night than Obama. He had to overcome himself.

In the past months, McCain stump speeches have taken on angry overtones. He has gone from calling his opponent “naive” on foreign policy to questioning the Illinois senator’s patriotic ideals. Last night, however, he showed a graciousness to Obama not seen before, at least by this reporter. Early on, he acknowledged Obama’s historic achievement in winning his party’s nomination, while promising a fair fight to come.

“We’ll go at it over the next two months,” McCain said. “That’s the nature of these contests, and there are big differences between us. But you have my respect and admiration. Despite our differences, much more unites us than divides us. We are fellow Americans, an association that means more to me than any other. We’re dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights. No country ever had a greater cause than that. And I wouldn’t be an American worthy of the name if I didn’t honor Sen. Obama and his supporters for their achievement.” (Of course, this didn’t stop McCain from taking a thinly-veiled shot at Obama late in his speech.)

No one has ever accused McCain as being a great orator. But this speech did play to his strength in foreign policy. It wasn’t folksy or colloquial. Shrugging off Code Pink protesters, he spoke with full declarations stressing experience and toughness, the primary themes of his campaign.

“We have dealt a serious blow to Al Qaeda in recent years,” he said before that god-awful light blue background. “But they are not defeated, and they’ll strike us again if they can. Iran remains the chief state sponsor of terrorism and on the path to acquiring nuclear weapons. Russia’s leaders, rich with oil wealth and corrupt with power, have rejected democratic ideals and the obligations of a responsible power. They invaded a small, democratic neighbor to gain more control over the world’s oil supply, intimidate other neighbors, and further their ambitions of reassembling the Russian empire. And the brave people of Georgia need our solidarity and prayers.

“As president, I will work to establish good relations with Russia so we need not fear a return of the Cold War. But we can’t turn a blind eye to aggression and international lawlessness that threatens the peace and stability of the world and the security of the American people.

“We face many threats in this dangerous world, but I’m not afraid of them,” he continued. “I’m prepared for them. I know how the military works, what it can do, what it can do better, and what it should not do. I know how the world works. I know the good and the evil in it. I know how to work with leaders who share our dreams of a freer, safer and more prosperous world, and how to stand up to those who don’t. I know how to secure the peace.”

Still, he missed where one expected him to miss. Since the end of the primaries, Democrats have hammered McCain for being out of touch with ordinary folk, for having an adviser in Phil Graham, who deemed the country’s economic woes “mental” and called America a nation of “whiners.” In many town halls, McCain has struggled to talk about issues like education and wages, the mortgage crisis and the loss of manufacturing jobs.

“It was probably the weakest speech of the four nominees,” said historian David Greenberg, author of “Nixon:The History of an Image.” “The main problem is he really does not have a real domestic policy vision as late as Sept. 4. You can’t be a Teddy Roosevelt conservative and appeal to the present-day Republican Party. It was really kind of muddled. When he talked about domestic issues and people being out of work, it was like he was using rhetoric straight from the Democrats….It was like he was groping around to try and speak about the decisive issue of the election which is economics.”

Of course, McCain was preaching to the converted. In the hours before he spoke, Montana delegate Karen Pfäehler sat where her delegation would be gathering. Still beaming over the Palin speech, she broke off our conversation when we started on the economic hardships faced by Americans, saying, “I trust him to keep us safe and I don’t trust Barack Obama. Without security, economic issues don’t matter.”

Echoing that same sentiment, Andrea Hoffman, an Oregon delegate and realtor from Salem, wearing a red-Rhinestone cowboy hat said, “McCain gives us security and stability for the country. If we don’t have security domestic issues don’t matter. Look, I’m proud to be an American and I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of us.”

“This is a scary time and Barack Obama makes me nervous,” said Dave Johnson, an Ohio delegate who runs a ceramic tile business founded by his grandfather. “You have a country like Iran that wants nuclear weapons, and wants to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. Obama wants to sit down and talk to them. This is absurd.

“This is one of the most reckless, liberal candidates the Democrats have put up in quite some time,” Johnson said. “I’m frightful if he’s elected–not only for the economy but for our national security.”

Acceptance speeches do not have to reach the heights climbed by the Democratic candidate in Denver. They can simply be moments of definition — where you reassure the base that you represent the best interests of your party and present a policy package before the growing number of independents who make up the U.S. electorate.

“We have 60 days to convince these middle-of-the-road voters that we have the right vision for the future,” said Yantis Green, a Texas delegate, who, like the rest of his delegation sported a cowboy hat and a red-white-and-blue buttoned-down shirt. “You can’t take away what Obama did last week. He did exactly what he had to do. No wonder their base was fired up. We know we’ve got work to do.

“What we’re suffering from is end-of-the-second-term fatigue,” Green continued. “You saw it with Reagan. You saw it with Clinton. And now you’re seeing that with Bush. For those middle-of-the-road voters, it’s going to come down to substance and issues — and we have a different set of issues than the Democrats. When we get down to the middle-of-the-road voters we have to sell. Our plan is simply better.”

McCain enters the general election as the anti-Bush. He lacks the personal touch the current president displayed in beating Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. He is a man of Washington, a senator who will not come to the White House as an outsider. Moreover he has a personal narrative that few of us can fully comprehend. But perhaps that’s not so bad.

“He’s someone you perhaps more admire than relate to,” said Kerry Healey, the former Massachusetts lieutenant governor, as she sat alone, waiting for the official events to begin. “For leaders we want both. We want them to be both just like us and better than we are — and that’s a hard thing to do.

“He’s the president of the United States,” Healey said. “You’re not going over for a beer.”

]]> http://washingtonindependent.com/4610/mccain-plays-to-strengths/feed 12 http://washingtonindependent.com/4491/ohio-boy-no-more http://washingtonindependent.com/4491/ohio-boy-no-more#comments Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:45:48 +0000 Sridhar Pappu http://www.washingtonindependent.com/?p=4491 St. Paul–Standing on the floor of the Xcel center last night made me embarrassed about where I come from. Born in Ohio to immigrant parents, with a father who came from nothing — meaning no shoes till he was nine — who then rose to the supposed academic elite, I’ve always played the role of the good Midwestern boy. I love the Reds and the Bengals, and high-school football. I have respect for families struggling on the farm and in the trailer park — because I’ve known them, gone to school with their sons and daughters. It’s a story I share with Palin. Last night, it made me ill.

That’s because I’ve been away from “home” for a long time now. I went to one of those fancy schools that was mocked last night. I’ve lived in Chicago and New York and Washington. I’ve traveled the world. But I’ve always said I’m an Ohio boy at heart. Or so I thought.

Now, I don’t know if I want to cling to that anymore. Palin would like you to believe that we’re not supposed to escape our small-town upbringings. That’s a fine notion, but it made me think about what we’re supposed to do. I’ve always said that I left Ohio not out of a need for some great escape from small-town life, but because the work I wanted to do was elsewhere.

I suspect that Sen. Barack Obama felt somewhat the same way when he left Hawaii for Columbia University and then Harvard Law. But Palin would make you believe there’s something wrong with that. It’s playing the class card and it’s simply wrong.

It’s using this idea of false authenticity to a place, to reject what our great founders envisioned as the forward movement in the American experiment — to say because someone chose not to stay in their humble beginnings he shouldn’t be trusted.

There are many times when I’m proud to say where I’m from. But Palin cheapened that narrative and millions like it last night. Today, I’ll just say that I live in Washington — with no backstory. And leave it at that.

That was the only response I could ultimately come up with after watching former Tennessee senator and Republican presidential nominee Fred Thompson address his party’s national convention from a Cleveland hotel bar Tuesday.

He was folksy, direct, mean, authoritative–all of the things we were waiting for as he seemed to sleepwalk his way through what has to be considered one of the worst primary runs in recent memories.

It was the ideal set-up for Sen. John McCain’s speech tonight. Thompson told the Vietnam War hero’s story better than he could ever tell it himself.

In truth Thompson was playing the part we all expected of him–Arthur Branch, the brash New York District Attorney from my favorite television show “Law & Order.” As a L&O addict like most reporters (if you travel as much as we do there’s no time to follow Jim and Pam or whatever their names are on “The Office”) I came to love Branch. As the conservative counterweight to Sam Waterston’s Jack McCoy, Branch provided a solid anchor for the show whose strict view of the Constitution often provided tense, intellectually heft moments in the show.

But it occurs to me we’ve been asking the same question of a lot of ex-candidates lately. Where was the Al Gore who spoke at Invesco Field in 2000? How come John Kerry couldn’t have generated the kind of fire he did last week in Denver?

The conventional wisdom of course says they held back because they were running for office and wanted to be careful. And really, it’s a shame. At a time when people crave candor out of their candidates, we are left with the passionless, scrubbed-version of their true selves. And what we are left with watching these men nearly always starts with a sentence that begins with “What if…..”

News of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Hurricane Gustav has eclipsed a series of police raids that took place in the Twin Cities over the weekend, in which FBI agents and local law enforcement detained six people on suspicion of conspiracy to riot at the Republican National Convention. The detainees have not been formally charged with any crime and their lawyers are in court on Monday, Labor Day, seeking their release. There were no similar pre-emptive arrests of protesters at the Democratic Convention in Denver last week.

The raids started Friday night in downtown St. Paul, with armed officers entering an anarchist headquarters, known as a “convergence space.” The occupants, who were ordered to lie on the floor, demanded to see a warrant — as heard on the audio on this not-very-revealing video.

Bob Fletcher, the Ramsey County sheriff, whose jurisdiction covers St. Paul, said the action was part of an investigation of the RNC Welcoming Committee. He was described the group as “a criminal enterprise made up of 35 self-described anarchists who are intent on committing criminal acts before and during the Republican National Convention. These acts include tactics to blockade and disable delegate buses, breaching venue security and injuring police officers.”

No arrests were made.

On Saturday morning, FBI and local police raided a home in Minneapolis that houses an organization called Guns Not Bombs. Four people were detained on “probable cause” for conspiracy to riot.

The search warrant for the raid said police were looking for “assembled, improvised incendiary devices” and urine and feces, apparently to be used in protests. Fletcher said the urine had been seized. Lawyers for protesters said the material identified as “unidentified liquid” was actually gray water used to save water in an ecologically correct toilet. The officers did find 37 “caltrops” in the garage of the home, according to MnIndy’s Molly Priesmeyer who reviewed the police inventory of material seized in the raid. A caltrop is a nail-like device used to stop traffic or puncture wheels.

While some complained of rough tactics, at least one of the officers acted with decency, according to MnIndy. As a five-year-old boy was escorted from the home by police, he said he wanted his markers. An officer went in and came back out a few minutes later. “These are the only colors I could find,” he said. “Did I get the right stuff?”

On Saturday afternoon, police kicked in the door of another house in Minneapolis and detained three people on suspicion of conspiracy to riot.

On Sunday morning, The National Lawyers Guild said a total of six people had been detained but none had been formally charged. Police have 72 hours to charge detained suspects. Guild lawyers said they would seek judicial review on Monday of the “probable cause holds” used to detain the six activists.