Memo To Governor Palin: Boffo Speech, But You Got The Lipstick Analogy All Wrong

It has now been confirmed that Sarah Palin can bite. But can she chew and digest?

In a Republican National Convention appearance that was 95 percent theater and 5 percent substance, the Alaska governor broke her silence with an Exxon Valdez of a speech laden with empty rhetoric that was received with roaring adulation by delegates already fired up by the demagogic Rudy Giuliani, whom we can truly thank God is not on the ticket.

And oh the quips!

"The difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?

"Lipstick."

Lowering expectations to subterranean levels and then dutifully ignoring her bald-faced lies -- that she never supported the infamous Bridge To Nowhere, pushed for earmarks or supported special interests -- the feckless news media declared that Palin had hit a home run.

The Wall Street Journal, giddily oblivious to Palin's singular talent as a public official who fires police chiefs, librarians and anyone else who gets in her way, compared Palin to Margaret Thatcher. Fox News, its Teleprompters locked and loaded with with gender-specific language, gushed that Palin "could defang" Joe Biden. Analogies to cat fights and that the campaign now has legs are sure to follow.

For a few minutes, all of the baggage that Palin brought to the McCain ticket was so much flotsam bobbing in the Bering Sea, but then a funny thing happened:

The sun came up in the east again this morning in St. Paul and Washington and New Orleans and Baghdad and Kabul, and the tough-talking, walking-the-walk woman with a hip pocket full of one-liners from the GOP snark factory was just as unqualified and unprepared as when John McCain gave her a ringie-dingie six days ago and asked her to accompany him to the Big Dance. That is because no flash-card crash course in world affairs by neocon tutors is going to prepare someone as uncurious and dogmatic as Palin for prime time.

Palin's references to her family, which left acres of delegates in tears, were as cold as a bottle of kompassionate konservatism ketchup sitting in an empty refrigerator in the kitchen of a foreclosed house.

This is because while Palin is surely a loving mommy to her knocked-up daughter and special-needs son, she checks her heart at the door as a card-carrying right-wing Christianist and culture warrior who would forbid a helping hand from Washington, let alone Juneau, for our own similarly challenged offspring. As if to hammer this home, she took a carefully aimed and deeply insulting swipe at the soul of many an American town and city -- its community organizers -- and by extension the poor, downtrodden and others that they serve.

A sure-fire way to attract all those disaffected Democratic women, no? And after giving her speech a second listen this morning, it sounded awfully like an acknowledgement that the Republicans are giving up on attracting swing voters and will focus instead on placating its restive base with lots of red meat.

But nary a peep about her conservative heroes: George Bush and Dick Cheney.

How can that be? How could Palin talk relentlessly about "change" when her date to the Big Dance voted with her heroes the vast majority of the time? In fact, her speech was about as backward looking as I can recall at any convention, turning on its ear the notion that these confabs are about setting the table and going bodly forward. This, by golly, is because McCain-Palin would be just four more years of the same old same old.

Yes, Palin proved herself to be a smooth talking mocker, but you'd better believe that McCain's handlers will keep her on a short leash so she doesn't step on the Big Guy's lines. In fact, in the weeks to come, Palin's primary job will be to put lipstick on McCain and not herself.

And that promises to be a particularly unattractive sight.