Barrel Strength

The full text is here.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/51691.html

Text plus video:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/johnmccain/2678962/Sarah-Palins-speech-to-the-Republican-Convention.html

My impression coincides with Andrew Coyne’s: “the best natural speechmaker since Ronald Reagan.”

Ladies and Gentlemen: I watched Sarah Palin last night and was astonished at the directness, the emotional appeal, the confidence, and the ability of Governor Palin. I could feel the wind going out of Obama’s sails, just as in the Patrick O’Brian novels, a broadside stills the wind. Whether the Obama campaign falters, whether the McCain campaign starts resonating with Americans more, cannot be known at this time, but I sure felt the fear in the Democratic camp this morning.

Did it encourage new constituencies to join the Republicans? I cannot tell. It sure succeeded in motivating me, a Canadian conservative, to think that the Republicans have found their woman to take the battle to the Democrats on the emotional and policy planes. On policy, McCain wants this election to be about oil. Palin is sound on this.

On emotions, Palin perfectly captures the constellation of sentiments that activate American conservatives at this time: their resentment at being condescended to by a man who complains about the price of arugula, a vegetable I had never heard of; their dismissal of the self-absorption of the liberal American, who is more concerned with the purity of his feelings than with the consequences of his actions; the pride in family, and consequently the hostility to liberal sexual and reproductive policies, which are so much more concerned with the rights of men to have sex with one another than the much more important issue of giving birth to children in stable families and raising them for twenty years to be honourable citizens. Here Palin captured fully the cultural gap between conservative and liberal (in the American sense of the word), and put the issue down to: whom do you want to govern you? It is a character question.

The appeal of Obama is that he has let the white population of America off the hook. No more extortion over race. Good. I think he has decisively changed the subject. Having done so, he has entered another level of the contest: who are you and what are you about?

A propos that question, a colleague was gambling for serious money with various Canadians and Americans last week. The topic turned to Obama. Everyone at the table thought that Obama was going to win, said he, except the lone American black man, who said that there was no way in hell a black man was going to be elected President of the United States of America. The gamblers at the table all said the same thing: “Obama is not black”. This caused the poor fellow’s circuits to overload.

It is interesting how Obama has caused people to have a much more accurate idea of what “black” means. The old “one drop” idiocy seems to be undergoing replacement by a much more culturally aware and less biological view of race, which is another benefit of the Obama candidacy for Americans of all political persuasions.