Led by McCain campaign chieftain Steve Schmidt, the whole GOP/conservative chattering class is in full whine today, trying to discredit any questions about or criticism of Sarah Palin as representing media sexism (conservatives being well-known, of course, for their deep sensitivity to gender bias). Among other things, this line of attack is clearly a big shout-out to the dwindling but still significant ranks of disgrunted Hillary Clinton supporters, who famously, and with considerable justification, made the same complaints about media coverage of HRC.
But the bigger question is whether Sarah Palin herself, in her acceptance speech tonight, does some tastefully delivered whining of her own. To put it another way, does she cast herself as Everywoman–a highly sympathetic “hockey mom” who’s being beat up on by elitist Democrats and media figures–or as Superwoman–a highly acccomplished executive whose slim resume disguises a deep knowledge of public affairs and a demonstrated commitment to “reform?”
I’ve heard some political observers privately predict that Palin will go pretty heavily into her “personal story” to bond with working-class and/or female voters, in a latter-day version of the famous Nixon “Checkers Speech.” (For those who haven’t read about it, this was the 1952 speech wherein an embattled Veep nominee accused of benefitting from a slush fund saved his career with a heartstring-tugging evocation of his modest roots and lifestyle, and his refusal to give up the gift to his daughter of a dog named “Checkers.”). But while we’ll definitely hear about her large family, her apparent lack of wealth, and such blue-collar pastimes as the slaying and consumption of moose, I suspect Palin will leave most of the victimization claims to the campaign and the right-wing media, and focus instead on dealing with real concerns about her preparation for the White House that can’t be dismissed as reflecting sexism.
The already-tedious comparisons of her years of public service to Obama’s will only get the McCain-Palin ticket so far, and could eventually, like Dan Quayle’s constant comparisons of his resume to JFK’s in 1988, even backfire. After all, Obama’s significantly reduced if not eliminated fears about his own level of preparation by speaking fluently on a vast array of issues in the national spotlight of a very long campaign. Palin (or more accurately, the McCain campaign’s speechwriters) can’t match that in a single speech. But realistically, so long as she’s good at reading a teleprompter, there’s no reason to expect that she won’t pass her first big test.
One thing you won’t hear about tonight are her extremist views on a variety of hot-button issues. Yes, she will almost certainly mention her recent decision to have a child with Down Syndrome, and perhaps her own daughter’s even more recent decision to carry to term a pre-marital pregnancy. But she probably won’t go out of her way to make it clear that she would deny a choice in such matters to every other woman in America. She certainly doesn’t need to pander to conservative activists tonight. Deep in their bones, they are convinced that she is “one of them” on a level rarely attained by politicians. So they’ll be happy to let her perform strictly for the benefit of swing voters in her acceptance speech, cheering her “maverick” paens to bipartisanship and reform and all that stuff they don’t actually believe in (monomaniacal oil drilling, of course, is another matter!).
But Sarah Palin, and McCain-Palin, are hardly going to be out of the woods when the convention ends. The predictably positive media reviews she’ll earn with a minimally credible performance tonight will, ironically, undermine all the whining about media bias, and enable continued scrutiny of her record and views. Maybe she’ll be able to kick the “Troopergate” can down the road past election day, but maybe not. Her cozy relationship with the loony Alaska Independence Party could be a ticking time bomb. The vice presidential debate could be perilous, as it was for Dan Quayle. And the Obama campaign’s showing an early willingness to go after her and McCain’s extremist position on abortion, threatening their appeal to pro-choice women.
Michael Crowley at TNR has a more detailed analysis of what we might expect from Palin tonight. I agree with his conclusion that she’s positioned to meet or exceed low expectations. A little bit of Everywoman, and a first effort to look like Superwoman, is all she needs for now. What happens later is another matter.

Compared to Zell Miller’s snarling attack on John Kerry at the 2004 Republican Convention, Joe Lieberman’s big speech in St. Paul last night wasn’t particularly remarkable. But it was a bit surreal, and not just because Lieberman was the vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party two cycles ago.
After all, Lieberman was speaking to an assemblage of hard-core conservative activists, many of whom just last week threatened to disrupt the convention and take a walk in November if McCain dared place the Connecticut “independent Democrat” on his ticket. Most of his listeners would privately condemn him as a baby-killing, tax-crazy, tree-hugging labor hack whose frantic support of the Iraq War is his only redeeming policy position. Yet Lieberman’s entire message was about “bipartisanship,” or as The Corner’s Andy McCarthy put it today, “all that drivel about crossing the aisle and needing to ‘get things done.'” He even contrived to deliver a line that forced delegates to cheer Bill Clinton.
We’ll hear a lot more of “that drivel” tonight and tomorrow night, and the delegates will continue to dutifully applaud, even though few of them actually believe in “bipartisanship” or want to “get things done” through government beyond fighting a few wars and regulating the private lives of American citizens.
The reality of this convention is that conservatives have long since gotten their pound of flesh from John McCain via his long march to the Right since 2004; his selection of Sarah Palin as his running-mate discharged all debts in full. Those delegates are now purely and simply stage props for a television show in which McCain and Palin will relentlessly beat the “maverick” and “reform” drums in an implicit, if dishonest, repudiation of the party and ideology they represent, not to mention the incumbent administration whose policies they support.
The delegates will cheer “all that drivel” to the rafters, knowing they’ve got their man, and their woman, firmly in the party harness.

As Dems grapple with defining an effective strategy for addressing the Palin veep nomination, the dossier is filling up fast. In addition to James Vega’s TDS article on messaging The Palin appointment and Ed Kilgore’s analysis yesterday, some of the better recent articles include:
Jason Leopold of Consortiumnews.com has a good update on “troopergate.” See also Robert Parry’s Alternet post “Sarah Palin’s Trouble With the Police.” And Jim Carlton reports in the Wall St. Journal that “Democratic Sen. Hollis French, who is overseeing the legislative probe expected to end by Halloween, said he is concerned the governor may try to delay his inquiry past the November election by trying to move the jurisdiction to the personnel board.”
William Yardley’s disturbing portrait of Palin as book-banning ideologue during her stint as a small town mayor, leads on the front page in today’s New York Times.
Also in the Grey Lady, Kate Zernike and Kim Severson have an article about Palin’s hubby, Todd Palin, a.k.a. “The First Dude,” which discusses his role in ‘troopergate’ and describes his ‘pet cause’ as “vocational education and encouraging young Alaskans to get stable jobs in the oil and gas industry.” The authors also note that he was employee of BP during Gov. Palin’s advocacy of the pipeline.
NYT‘s The Caucus also reports that Palin, though not a “member” of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, “attended the party’s 1994 and 2006 conventions and provided a video-taped address as governor to the 2008 convention.” TPMMuckraker‘s Kate Klonick reports that “the director of Division of Elections in Alaska, Gail Fenumiai, told TPMmuckraker that Todd Palin registered in October 1995 to the Alaska Independence Party, a radical group that advocates for Alaskan secession from the United States.”
John Dolan’s Alternet post, “Sarah Palin’s Big, Sleazy Safari” documents the GOP veep nominee’s assault on the environment for the benefit of favored industries.
Dogemperor at Daily Kos takes an in-depth look at Palin’s theocratic influences as a ‘stealth dominionist.’
Alternet‘s Isaac Fitzgerald and Tana Ganeva report on Palin’s line-item veto of “a transitional home for teen moms in Alaska.”
In his HuffPo Post, “Country First? Nevermind,” Robert Borosage explains how McCain’s Palin appointment reveals his politically-driven abandonment of the first duty of a President — to select an experienced and capable Vice President. And former Bush speechwriter David Frum questions McCain’s judgement, saying “the destiny of the free world would be placed in the hands of a woman who until recently was a small-town mayor.”
Reporting on the new Rasmussen poll on Palin, Slate‘s Jim Ledbetter says “Still, I find it staggering that two out of three women say Palin is unqualified to be president, and that more women say the choice of Palin makes them LESS likely to vote for McCain, while more men say it makes them MORE likely..”

As the Republican Convention tries to get back on track, and as Sarah Palin and John McCain prepare their crucial acceptance speeches, there’s been an interesting buzz in the background about Palin’s relationship with the Alaska Independence Party.
The AIP (or AKIP, as it likes to style itself) is an exotic but locally significant political party that’s long advocated a reconsideration of Alaska’s 1958 decision to accept statehood, with a return to territorial status, an independent “Republic” position, or secession to Canada (or to some new confederation of Western Canadian provinces) being lively options. AKIP is also a state affiliate of the Constitution Party, a far-right fringe group founded by Howard Phillips “to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.”
Thanks to some investigative work by Mark Kleiman, we know that AKIP claims that Sarah Palin is a former member of its party who attended their 1994 convention. On an inquiry by TalkingPointsMemo, Alaska election officials confirmed that Palin’s husband was a registered AKIP voter up until 2002. There are disputed claims about Governor Palin’s own party registration, but she did send a warm-and-fuzzy video greeting to their latest convention.
Whether or not Sarah Palin was ever a member of AKIP, her easy acceptance of this fringe group is significant. In the odd, neo-colonial poltical culture of Alaska, AKIP is not that far out of the mainstream. But make no mistake: in the politics of the South 48, and particularly Republican politics, the AIP is, well, anti-American. Whatever she represented in Alaska, she is now the putative vice presidential candidate of a super-patriotic GOP and the handpicked running-mate of a presidential candidate whose message is “country first.” “Alaska First” or “Canada First” are not acceptable points of view for John McCain’s GOP, no matter how happy conservative activists may be about Palin’s reactionary views on cultural issues.
In this respect, Palin’s reminiscent of Trent Lott, who casually expressed a time-honored southern regional point of view about the Dixiecrat heritage in 2002, and thanks to Josh Marshall, got nailed for it.
It’s another bit of evidence that Sarah Palin’s a real, authentic, Alaskan wingnut: acceptable in her own political culture, but not so much in the rest of America.

Strange to say, tonight the Republican National Convention will reach its halfway point. And although Republicans, like the city of New Orleans, may have narrowly avoided calamity from Hurricane Gustav, they’ve already lost the opportunity to match the carefully staged and rolled-out show Democrats put on in Denver last week.
Moreover, the drama that the McCain camp introduced into Convention Week with the Sarah Palin announcement last Friday is getting a bit out of control, and “out of control” is not a phrase you want to hear during a national political convention. Yesterday’s revelation that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant, and will carry the pregnancy to term and marry the child’s father, has increased suspicions that Team McCain did not conduct a particularly thorough vetting of their vice presidential candidate. When you are a 72-year-old cancer survivor running for president on your experience and character, an inept vice presidential selection process is not very reassuring.
It’s now clear that Palin will be the central focus of the GOP convention in a way that Joe Biden certainly wasn’t in Denver. And this presents the McCain campaign with an exquisite dilemma. Does it try to puff up her brief record of public service into an edifice of impressive accomplishments, claiming that she’s at least as qualified to become president as Barack Obama? Or does it go in the other direction and tout her lack of gravitas as an emblem of authenticity and populist “maverick” credentials?
I’m sure they’ll try to do both simultaneously, but my money’s on the latter theme as the real emphasis. At the Democratic convention, a lot of podium time was devoted to showcasing “real people” like Barney Smith and Lily Ledbetter with compelling personal stories related to the Obama campaign’s message and agenda. At the Republican convention, the most important “real person” to speak may well be the vice presidential nominee.
At Politico today, Charles Mahtesian nicely channels this approach to marketing Palin:

So far — and it is hard to tell what the future may hold for Palin’s unexpected national candidacy — the travails of the Palin family probably seem awfully familiar to many average Americans. It is this averageness that makes her such a politically promising running mate for John McCain — and such a dangerous opponent for Democrats. Many voters will find it easy to identify with her family’s struggles — a significant advantage in an election where the voting calculus is so unusually and intensely personal….
Even the governor’s own Trooper-gate scandal, in which Palin is alleged to have exerted undue pressure to fire a state trooper, is suffused with an element that many families can identify with: one sister stepping in on behalf of another in an acrimonious dispute with a brother-in-law.

While this approach is obviously risky, it has the additional benefit of representing something of a trap for Democrats, as I argued the other day. In a maneuver as old as the Nixon administration, Republicans can be expected to turn every every sneering reference to Palin’s lack of polish, her family issues, or her backwoods resume, into an elitist assault on the hardy folk virtues of the American people.
Aside from the fact that Palin’s Everywoman appeal could be overplayed–most Americans, after all, don’t consider themselves qualified to run the country–the vulnerability of this approach is that the Governor of Alaska doesn’t have “average” views. Sure, many people, particularly woman, will be able to relate to the painful choices Palin and her daughter faced in dealing with their pregnancies. But the fact remains that Sarah Palin fiercely believes that there was really no choice to be made in either case other than to carry the pregnancy to term, and would deny other women the choice of abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, by force of law.
And this is why the real excitement over the choice of Palin by McCain is most evident among the far fringes of right-wing populism, the kind of people who view politics as a righteous holy war against the “liberal elites” of both parties; the kind of activists who sent checks all those years to Jesse Helms’ Congressional Club and marched in the ranks of the Christian Right. Richard Viguerie, the godfather of right-wing direct mail, a man whose alienation from the Republican Party’s alleged infidelity to conservatism led him to advocate a Democratic victory in 2006, declared Palin “perfect.” Phyllis Schlafly, the slayer of the Equal Right Amendment and tireless agitator of every conservative fever swamp, called Palin the “complete package,” and was planning an event in St. Paul to fete her long before McCain selected her as veep. Christian Right warhorse James Dobson called Friday, the day Palin was announced, as “one of the most exciting days of my life.” Pat Buchanan went so far as to claim Palin as a member of his 1996 Brigades (a claim the McCain campaign quickly denied). At National Review’s The Corner and at Redstate.org, those durable blogospheric sounding posts for “movement conservatives,” her selection touched off all-day celebrations.
The notably cool reaction of GOP neoconservatives to the McCain/Palin ticket (their favorite, Joe Lieberman, was decisively vetoed by social conservatives) simply underscores her symbolism as the apotheosis of right-wing populism.
What all sorts of conservatives see in Sarah Palin is a real, authentic, salt-of-the-earth wingnut–“normal” only to the extent that your nice neighbor with the fading “US Out of the UN!” yard sign can be said to be “normal.” That may or may not be actually true of Palin, but what we know of her views and history so far certainly fits the profile well enough to explain the intense excitement about her among people who think the Republican Party has been dangerously and disappointingly liberal for decades.
And that is why I feel so strongly that Democrats should focus on her nutty views and questionable associations rather than her lack of experience in characterizing this critical decision by John McCain as reckless and irresponsible. Struggling with a choice between satisfying a restless Right and reinforcing his “maverick” street cred, McCain found a running-mate who was a “maverick” from the Right. And the one thing Democrats should not let McCain get away with this week is the contention that Palin has a natural claim on support and affection from moderate swing voters, particularly women who don’t believe in compulsory pregnancy.

Democratic strategists have been temporarily caught off guard by the surprise selection of Sarah Palin. The Western right-wing populism of which she is an example is an extremely varied and highly idiosyncratic political ideology and strategists both inside and outside the Obama-Biden campaign are requiring additional time to fully understand her particular constellation of views.
No matter what additional information and analysis may appear in the next 5-10 days, however, one likely conclusion will be that no single message or master narrative will be effective as a response. Rather, the Democratic response to Palin will need to be disseminated as a series of highly targeted messages specifically designed for particular audiences.
The four facts below provide the foundation for a series of 6 targeted messages.

1. That McCain rejected Mitt Romney in order to pick Palin
2. That Rush Limbaugh energetically promoted Palin’s candidacy and Ralph Reed, James Dobson and Richard Viguerie all consider her one of their own. A number of articles suggest that the desire to satisfy this group played a very significant role in McCain’s decision to choose her.
3. That Palin has extremely limited experience.
4. That Palin has a history of pressuring and firing political opponents. This is not just in relation to a single case regarding a particular State Trooper, but in other cases as well when she was mayor of her small town.

Using this information, the following targeted messages can be developed.
1. Target Audience: Republican businessmen
Theme: “Palin – An irresponsible choice”
Narrative: Any 79 year old CEO of a major multinational corporation who appointed a successor who lacked any international experience at all would be judged by most businessmen to have acted in a terribly irresponsible way and possibly even be liable to legal action. McCain’s selection of Palin is actually a great deal more irresponsible and represents a profound and deeply disturbing failure of good judgment and thoughtful decision-making.

Read more…

Traditionally, Labor Day was viewed as the starting-point for presidential general election campaigns. This year the holiday marks a peculiar juncture in the campaign where a vast number of potentially crucial factors are almost impossible to measure.
Even without Hurricane Gustav, the unusually close juxtaposition of the Democratic and Republican conventions, and the announcement of a “surprise” Republican veep selection, have made it difficult to adjudge the impact of the Denver event, with the smartest analysts suggesting that we should wait until after the GOP event to figure out which party got a true “bounce.”
And now Gustav has at least temporarily turned the Republican convention upside-down, all but cancelling its first-day events, and quite possibly altering its tone and message in profound ways. The former effect is a mixed bag for the GOP: mostly what they sacrificed were speeches by the incumbent president and vice president, a mandatory ritual that many Republicans are happy to foreswear. But so long as the atmosphere of national emergency remains, it will be very difficult for the GOP to underake an assault on the Democratic Convention message from St. Paul.
As of this writing, it appears that New Orleans has been spared a Katrina-like calamity. But Republican convention planners can’t immediately return to business-as-usual, since it will be a day or two before we know for sure that the Crescent City and other parts of Louisiana and Texas haven’t been ravaged by flooding or ancillary weather events like tornadoes.
You can only imagine what John McCain’s staff is going through right now in rewriting their presidential and vice presidential candidates’ acceptance speeches to reflect hourly changes in the political interaction between the convention and Gustav (and possibly, later in the week, Hanna).
At a minimum, it’s very unlikely that the Republicans in St. Paul will be able to launch the sort of negative carpet-bombing of their opponent that characterized the 2004 event in New York. And with the fundamentals of the overall campaign still favoring Democrats, that could be good news for the Obama-Biden ticket.
Let’s all hope and pray that we won’t see anything like a reprise of the Katrina nightmare this week. But you can’t take the politics out of politics, and we’ll know a lot more about the dynamics of this most unusual presidential election a week from now.