THERE are some moments when members of
a political movement come together as one,
sharing the same thoughts, feeling the same
emotions, breathing the same shallow breaths.
One of those occasions occurred Thursday night
when Republicans around the country crouched
nervously behind their sofas, glimpsed out tentatively
at their flat screens and gripped their beverages
tightly as Sarah Palin walked onto the debate
stage at Washington University in St. Louis.
There she was, resplendent in black, striding
out like a power-walker, and greeting Joe Biden
like an assertive salesman, first-naming him right
off the bat.
Just as the mid-century psychologist Abraham
Maslow predicted, Republicans watching the debate
had a hierarchy of needs. First, they had a
need for survival. Was this woman capable of completing
an extemporaneous paragraph -- a collection
of sentences with subjects, verbs, objects and,
if possible, an actual meaning?
By the end of her opening answers, it was clear
she would meet the test. She spoke with that calm,
measured poise that marked her convention
speech, not the panicked meanderings of her subsequent
interviews.
When nervous, Palin has a tendency to overenunciate
her words like a graduate of the George
W. Bush School of Oratory, but Thursday night she
spoke like a normal person. It took her about 15
seconds to define her persona -- the straight-talking
mom from regular America -- and it was immediately
clear that the night would be filled with
tales of soccer moms, hockey moms, Joe Sixpacks,
Main Streeters, "you betchas" and "darn rights."
Somewhere in heaven, Norman Rockwell is
smiling.
With a bemused smile and a never-ending flow
of words, she laid out her place on the ticket -- as
the fearless neighbour for the heartland bemused
by the idiocies of Washington. Her perpetual smile
served as foil to Biden's senatorial seriousness.
Where was this woman during her interview
with Katie Couric?
Their primal need for political survival
having been satisfied, her supporters
then looked for her to shift
the momentum. And here we come
to the interesting cultural question
posed by her performance. The presidency
and the vice-presidency once
was the preserve of white men in suits.
As Ellen Fitzpatrick pointed out on
PBS on Thursday night, if, in
1984, Geraldine Ferraro had
spoken in the relentlessly
folksy tones that Palin used,
she would have been
hounded out of politics
as fundamentally
unserious.
But that was before
casual Fridays, boxers or briefs and T-shirtclad
Silicon Valley executives. Today, Palin could
hit those colloquial notes again and again, and it is
not automatically disqualifying.
On Thursday night, Palin took her inexperience
and made a mansion out of it. From her first "Nice
to meet you; may I call you Joe?" she made it abundantly,
unstoppably and relentlessly clear that she
was not of Washington, did not admire Washington
and knew little about Washington.
She ran not only against Washington, but the
whole East Coast, just to be safe.
To many ears, her accent, her colloquialisms
and her constant invocations of
the accoutrements of everyday life
will seem cloying. But in the casual
parts of the country, I suspect, it
went down fine. In any case, that's
who Sarah Palin is.
On matters of substance, her
main accomplishment was to completely
sever ties to the Bush administration.
She treated Bush as
some historical curiosity from
the distant past. Beyond
that, Palin broke no new
ground, though she
toured the landscape
of McCain
policy positions
with surprising fluency.
Like the last debate,
this one was surprisingly wonky -- a lifetime
subscription to Congressional Quarterly. Palin
could not match Biden when it came to policy detail,
but she never obviously floundered.
She was surprisingly forceful on the subject of
Iran (pronouncing "Ahmadinejad" better than her
running mate) though she stepped over the line in
claiming that Democrats sought to raise the "the
white flag of surrender."
Biden, for his part, was smart, fluid and relentless.
He did not hit the change theme hard enough.
He did not praise Barack Obama enough. But he
was engaging, serious and provided a moving and
revealing moment toward the end, when he invoked
the tragedy that befell his own family and
revealed the passion that has driven him all his
life.
Still, this debate was about Sarah Palin. She held
up her end of an energetic debate that gave voters
a direct look at two competing philosophies. She
established debating parity with Joe Biden. And
in a country that is furious with Washington, she
presented herself as a radical alternative.
By the debate's end, most Republicans will not
have been crouching behind the couch, but standing
on it. The race has not been transformed, but
few could have expected as vibrant and tactically
clever a performance as the one Sarah Palin
turned in Thursday night.
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