She is not a person of thought but of action. ~Peggy Noonan

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. ~David Brooks

Noonan and Brooks actually fall over themselves trying to compliment Palin on the modest success of being coherent, but these excerpts are striking in that someone might have written them as withering, sarcastic criticism and instead they are supposed to be a celebration of her virtues.  Noonan complains that Biden showed too much forbearance, but this is exactly what Noonan and Brooks show in their efforts to tip-toe around the obvious that for all her mastery of the non-answer and glittering generalities, to borrow Halcro’s language, she did not do very well.  Incredibly, her fans don’t seem to mind debasing the meaning of excellence if it allows them to call what we saw last night excellent.  There ought to have been some acknowledgement that it didn’t matter, that McCain was already fumbling and crumbling under the weight of his own mistakes, but instead we are treated to newfound, baseless enthusiasm:

Sarah Palin saved John McCain again Thursday night. She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles: Clear! Zap! We’ve got a beat! She will re-electrify the base. More than that, an hour and a half of talking to America will take her to a new level of stardom.   

Well, there’s certainly no accounting for why people become excited about celebrities, but it seems to me that if the base is electrified any more it will begin to suffer permanent damage to its already clogged heart.  Noonan also notes that Palin’s “triumph” (no, I’m not making this up) comes on the heels of the defeat of the bailout bill in the House, but the bill comes up again today and is more likely to pass.  The bill is “festooned” (that word again!) with what are euphemistically called sweeteners–rather like the sugar one might add to mask the bitter taste of poison–and so it is unlikely the House will reject it again.  She says that the rejection of the bill, which the Senate just passed Wednesday with both McCain and Biden voting yea, “could not have helped Mr. Biden,” but it was the Republican candidate who needed the help and McCain’s support for the measure has ensured that he cannot tap into the populist backlash against it. 

Speaking of populism, Palin was peddling the phony variety earlier in the week on Hewitt’s program with her claim to represent Joe Sixpack (which is, of course, a name given to normal people by pundits who do not know them).  Noonan writes:

I’m not sure the McCain campaign is aware of it—it’s possible they are—but this is subtly divisive.

There’s nothing subtle about it, and it rings about as true as George Allen’s ridiculous claim to be one of the good ol’ boys, unlike that famous wine-and-cheeser Jim Webb.  The rapture with which “the base” greeted Palin’s Hewitt interview was in inverse proportion to the interview’s substance: “Oh, she called her son a stinker–how could we have ever doubted her?”  No doubt the word will go forth that anyone who questioned her competence has now been shown to be a fool and “out of touch.” Phony populism abounds on a ticket that embraced one of the most outrageous power-grabs of our time.

Noonan continues: 

As for the dismissal of conservative critics of Mrs. Palin as “Georgetown cocktail party types” (that was Mr. McCain), well, my goodness. That is the authentic sound of the aggression, and phony populism, of the Bush White House.  Good move. That ended well.  

In the end, that is all that McCain has.  The good news is that it will have a happier ending.  McCain will never have to find himself as a powerless lame duck President approaching the end of his second term, because he will never start his first.

Filed under: politics