Palin Comes Out Swinging

Palin on the 3^rd day of the RNC.
Photo Credit: treviño via Creative Commons and Flickr

On Friday of last week Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was figuring out if she has any anxieties about public speaking on the national stage. Now she knows; she has none. A short while ago she walked out onto a stage in St. Paul and addressed the Republican National Convention, accepting the Republican nomination for Vice President of the United States to chants of "Sarah! Sarah!"

For Palin, the stakes were unusually high. Her announcement as McCain's running mate last Friday was met with a degree of skepticism and shock and while Newsvine reporters at both the Republican and Ron Paul conventions indicated that she had been well received within the party and the larger conservative movement, the same could not be said of the country at large, least of all the media.

What She Had To Do

Tonight, Palin spoke to the Republicans second and America first. It was her first truly national address and one that sought primarily to establish her as a legitimate political contender in the Presidential arena. Though the McCain campaign has successfully kept expectations fairly low for Palin, she had to convincingly accomplish three major tasks in the course of her speech.

Win Hearts and Minds

Palin's first task was her easiest. For millions of Americans watching the Convention from home, this speech was their first introduction to the Alaska Governor. Their first impression of her, both as a person and a political leader, was vital to the GOP's ability to sell the McCain/Palin ticket. To that end, Palin had to meet the expectations of the Republican party and come across as charming, intelligent, and capable. It was a task she accomplished with flying colors. She successfully played up her mayoral and gubernatorial experience and spoke extensively of her family, establishing her status as a Republican "every-woman," with warm and extensive tales of her family's history.

But the Republican party and the American people need Palin to be more than a charming, intelligent, and capable woman; they need her to be Presidential. While Palin delivered a speech that set her apart as a warm and friendly counterpart to John McCain's brass-tacks public persona, she had difficulty communicating a sense of gravitas in her delivery. Palin's extensive discussion of her family also left her sounding a bit more like a late-night radio talk show host than a political heavyweight as she later sought to portray herself.

Make the Republican Case

That lack of gravitas should not, however, be confused for timidity. While the Republican Party stands for many things in 2008, the first and foremost issue on the mind of any GOP candidate for national office is why Barack Obama and Joe Biden do not deserve 272 electoral votes. Palin's attacks on the Democratic ticket were overt, brutal, and well delivered. She scored her political points with precision and pulled no punches, a style that played very well with the crowd at the RNC, but risks casting her as an attack-dog outside the walls of that convention center.

Politically aggressive or otherwise, few would argue that Palin's place on the Republican ticket is not also gamble for the 18,000,000 or so votes cast for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primary. With such a deep rift between Democrats and smoldering allegations of sexism as well it makes perfect sense to put a woman on the Republican ticket but that alone does not win those votes.

This speech marked Palin's first opportunity to present the Republican platform to the thousands – perhaps millions – of women to whom that political glass ceiling is a key issue. Palin's gender earns her their attention, but her ability to sell the platform is what will (or will not) win her their votes.

With "Drill Baby Drill" still reverberating throughout the convention hall, energy policy – particularly given its importance to her native Alaska – proved a logical and compelling starting point for Palin's Vice Presidential campaign. The Alaska Governor addressed the issue in pragmatic terms and common language, stating Our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will not solve all of America's energy problems - as if we all didn't know that already. But the fact that drilling won't solve every problem is no excuse to do nothing at all.

Dodge Bullets

Palin's remarks on energy were a far cry from the controversial positions espoused by her party. Indeed, in her discussion of many issues Palin studiously avoided the more divisive extremes of the Republican platform and gravitated towards the comfortable common ground in the middle. Notably absent from her speech was the pivotal issue of abortion. This and other wedge issues serve to endear Palin (and by extension McCain) to the Evangelical wing of the party base, but that wing requires little convincing and Palin's speech was not for their benefit.

Consequently, Governor Palin's address avoided the traditional right-wing talking-points and platitudes, seeking a more centrist tone on issues while maintaining an offensive against the Democrats. Unlike McCain, whose Conservative credentials remain in some doubt, Palin's record as a "maverick" is that of someone pulling her local party to the right rather than the center and as a consequence the voters she spoke to were those towards the middle, not those on the fringe.

Also notably absent from Palin's speech was any mention of the veritable blizzard of stories surrounding her past and candidacy. Since McCain tapped Palin on Friday, radio, television, and computer networks have been ablaze with revelations, disclosures, and questions about her past and her present. Largely unvetted by both the McCain campaign and by the media at large, Palin passed up her first and highest profile opportunity to diffuse many of these issues. This could well prove the biggest failing of her address to the Convention. Since Friday, bookies in the UK have dropped the payout on a bet that McCain would dump Palin from the ticket from 20:1 to 8:1; a veritable impossibility now, but perhaps indicative of the difficulty of the campaign yet to come.

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