Let's see: Conflict, sex, sensationalism, novelty, a nobody who will make news. And there sat Sarah Palin. It must have felt like finding Marilyn Monroe sitting on the stool at Schrafft's. It was close; deadlines are hell in the media business, and it came down to the final days. McCain wanted Joe Lieberman, but the poor guy was still thinking that an election was about governing. Media professionals see this all the time. It was a media professional in the 1960s who told the National Football League owners, "Guys, you're not in the football business, you're in the television business." A media pro had to pull McCain aside and explain to him that he wasn't in the governing business, he was in the winning business.
And so "Hockey Mom" went on the air, and it could not have been more successful: 10s for conflict, sex, sensationalism, novelty, proximity, fury at the media hellhounds, and sexism as a torch to stick in the face of any critic.
Gov. Sarah Palin is taking the wrong approach to Troopergate. She should be practicing the open and transparent, ethical and accountable government she promised when running for governor and boasts about now that she's on the national stage.
Instead, Gov. Palin has begun stonewalling the Legislature's attempt to get the bottom of allegations that she, her family or staff violated ethical or state personnel rules.
It's been a while since [Joe Biden] was nominated as a vice-presidential candidate, and we still haven't had a look at his medical history. This is the normal course of events for a person who could potentially be president next February. The press really needs to do its job and get Biden's medical records pronto. Again: this needn't be too invasive. It could even be done the way McCain's medical vetting was - reserved for a room of reporters to comb through all the major and obvious issues.
So what are you waiting for, Joe?
I did not want that to end last night . . . I didn't want the night to end. I didn't want Rudy to stop. What a night! Folks we have a future beyond November here. Regardless what happens…The convention has been unified on the basis of conservatism. Properly executed, beautifully articulated.
Believe me Barack Obama has a lot to fear today and he knows it . . . the drivebys are in panic, the Democrat Party is in panic, the liberal left is in panic . . . they do not know who hit them, they do not know who to respond to this.
This lady has turned it all around . . . from now on on this program John McCain will be known as John McBrilliant.
Sarah Palin's views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women. We ask that our song 'Barracuda' no longer be used to promote her image. The song "Barracuda" was written in the late 70s as a scathing rant against the soulless, corporate nature of the music business, particularly for women. (The "barracuda" represented the business.) While Heart did not and would not authorize the use of their song at the RNC, there's irony in Republican strategists' choice to make use of it there.
The Obama campaign has no silver bullet to use against the Palin. Instead, Obama has decided to largely avoid directly engaging her and will instead keep his focus largely on John McCain and on linking the Republican ticket to President George W. Bush. The Obama campaign will leave Palin to navigate the same cycle of celebrity that Obama has weathered, and the same peril that her nascent image will be defined by questions and contradictions from her Alaska past.
-- BEN SMITH
Even though he's 72, I never really think of John McCain as old, at least until he is forced to discuss domestic policy. It's not entirely his fault. When forced to make a nod to less manly subjects such as health care and education and other items not related to the war or foreign policy, his entire party's domestic policy offerings have changed little since Newt Gingrich was king of the Capitol. Case in point: Last night, McCain said he opposed Obama's "health-care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor."
It's the same argument Republicans used in 1994 to kill off the Clinton health plan. But much has changed since the debut of Harry and Louise 14 years ago, and the recycled line seems hugely out of touch with reality.
[T]he McCain campaign really has to hope that cultural insecurities are running high, because it's going to take a lot of attacks on arugula to overcome the state of the economy.
According to the Labor Department's latest jobs report, the unemployment rate hit a five-year high last month, with employers slashing 84,000 jobs, worse than economists were forecasting.
. . . It doesn't help that McCain recently described the fundamentals of our economy as "strong," and argued that we've seen "great progress, economically" under Bush's leadership.
-- STEVE BENEN
John McCain became a POW this week, at the hands of his own Party. It was Sarah Palin's Convention, not McCain's. His speech . . . was so out of sync with the vituperative tone and stale, hard-right cultural populism of the Convention's other headliners—above all, Palin—that he sounded less like a Presidential nominee than one of those token speakers given a spot on the program just to prove that the Party welcomes diversity. McCain stood before an arena full of stoked conventioneers, who seemed bored or turned-off as often as they seemed pleased by his remarks, and acquitted himself with the decency and honor that he summoned during the ordeal that defines his life.
But before everyone gets all smug and self-righteous about the Palin selection, remember where you live. You live in a nation of gun owners and hunters. You live in a country where one out of three girls get pregnant before they are 20. You live in a nation of C students. Knocking Bush for being a C student only endeared him to the nation of C students. Knock Palin for having kids, for having a kid who's having a baby, for anything that is part of her normalness -- a normalness that looks very familiar to so many millions of Americans -- well, you do this at your own peril. Assuming she's still on the ticket two weeks from now, she will be a much tougher opponent than anyone expects.
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