The enthusiasm generated by Sarah Palin, the Republican party’s new “northern
star”, on her first tour of Middle America this weekend has revived Senator
John McCain’s presidential campaign to such a remarkable extent that she is
outshining her running mate.
It is an unprecedented position of power for a vice-presidential candidate
that carries great risks and rewards for McCain as he adjusts to operating
in the shadow of a political phenomenon.
As the McCain-Palin road show took to the suburbs and small towns in the
Republican party’s target states, fans were running to see her rather than
McCain, the 72-year-old former Vietnam prisoner of war.
“I only found out half an hour ago that she was coming,” said Brenda River,
45, a hairdresser, mother of four and grandmother, as she hurried to the
Freedom Hill amphitheatre in a conservative suburb of Detroit, Michigan.
“I’m in her shoes, totally. I love her.”
Palin, 44, a pistol-packing political powerhouse and mother of five children
including Trig, a Down’s syndrome baby, and her pregnant 17-year-old
daughter Bristol, is the talk of River’s hair salon. “Everybody is saying,
‘Did you see here? Oh my God, wasn’t it a shock?’,” River said. “My husband
thinks she is drop-dead gorgeous. McCain has got fire under his butt.”
The amphitheatre was full to overflowing with 8,000 rapidly assembled voters
whom Palin described as the “salt of the earth”. With a bit more notice, it
is easy to imagine the moose-hunting Alaska governor attracting a crowd of
10 times that number, the size of Barack Obama’s enormous audience when he
accepted the Democratic nomination for president in Denver.
Next door was an evangelical mega-church, which cancelled its service so that
its congregation could see Palin in action. River, who is strongly
antiabortion, said McCain’s running mate was heaven-sent: “We’ve got to vote
the way God wants us to vote.” Or, as Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio
show host, put it: “Babies, guns, Jesus. Hot damn!”
If Hurricane Sarah can expand the Republican electorate, McCain could be swept
into the White House. With less than two months to the election on November
4, Obama’s young multi-ethnic movement for change is being pitted against
one of the most powerful election-winning blocs in American politics: the
white evangelical Christian vote, which is as fired up and ready to go as
Obama’s supporters.
McCain picked the skimpily vetted Palin as his running mate because he
regarded her as a maverick reformer like himself, who took on the corrupt
“good ol’ boys” network in her home state. But any revelations that might
emerge could be drowned out by a cultural battle that she has triggered
between the pro-life “values voters” and secular liberals of the kind that
finished McCain as a candidate in 2000, when George W Bush’s supporters
mobilised the religious right against him.
On this occasion it is McCain who stands to benefit but, unnervingly, the
campaign is no longer entirely in his control after Palin’s extraordinary
displays of people power. In just a few short days she has gone from being a
near-laughing stock over family problems – with Republican insiders
speculating that she could drop off the ticket – to being McCain’s biggest
asset.
At the Freedom Hill amphitheatre the crowd broke into chants of “Sarah! Sarah!
Sarah!”, drowning out McCain as he spoke about his running mate. Although he
revelled in the excitement, he seemed at times to be overwhelmed by the
audience’s passion.
By the end of the rally it was hard to tell whether this was still McCain’s
party. Matt Stath, a retired lorry driver, said: “She should run for
president. I’d vote for her for president and McCain as vice-president.
She’s going to be the most beautiful vice-president in history.”
In St Paul, Minnesota, as the Republican convention was packing up, Steve
Schmidt, McCain’s bald senior adviser known as the “bullet”, said Palin had
“energised and galvanised and breathed new life into the Republican party in
a way that none of us thought possible and didn’t anticipate”.
The plan to mobilise the base had not just succeeded, it had morphed into a
movement. Palin power, with its appeal to “regular” Americans, could propel
McCain to victory in the swing states of Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania,
where there is a strong blue-collar Christian presence, and may keep the
gun-loving mountain states such as Colorado and Montana in the Republican
column.
David Axelrod, Schmidt’s opposite number, admitted that the Obama campaign had
been caught on the hop by Palin’s nomination: “I can honestly say we weren’t
prepared for that. I mean, her name wasn’t on anybody’s list.”
The cool “no drama” Obama was mocked in St Paul as an effete liberal, whose
“pretty” speeches paled in comparison with Palin’s blazing guns rhetoric. An
explicit contrast was drawn between her patriotism – Track, her 19-year-old
son, is about to be deployed to Iraq – and Obama’s critique of America after
eight years of the Bush administration.
“When Obama says he wants change, he means he wants to change Americans,” said
Grover Norquist, an influential Republican tax reform lobbyist. “One message
of change is pro-American, the other isn’t. Obama thinks there is something
wrong with us.” The Republican convention had begun with delegates boasting
that their side had their ticket the “right way up” with experience at the
top and charisma to support it, unlike Obama and Joe Biden, his 65-year-old
running mate. But Palin’s astonishing raw political talent has allowed her
to hijack the election to a degree which terrifies some wise heads.
Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant and former McCain adviser, said: “The
loneliest precinct in the [party] these days is the one for troublesome
Republicans who think Sarah Palin was a poor VP choice, even after The
Speech. Well, here I am. Hello? Anybody else? Wow, there is a big echo in
here.”
He went on: “I don’t like the effect I think Palin will ultimately have on the
ticket. With all her charm, she is still a pick aimed squarely at the
Republican base. In a high-turnout presidential year I am not worried about
turning out the base. I’m worried about everybody else we need to win and I
fear that among those voters, Sarah Palin will be a dud.”
Murphy was caught on a live television microphone saying much the same thing
when he thought the mike had been turned off. The embarrassing audio quickly
made the rounds on YouTube, but the McCain camp – exhilarated by the success
of their protégée – was in no mood to listen. “Who cares?” Schmidt
responded.
Echoing Margaret Thatcher, Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review, a
conservative journal, pronounced Palin “one of us”. In response, money has
been pouring into McCain’s coffers – he left the convention with $200m to
spend – and the enthusiasm and charisma gap with Obama has been obliterated.
McCain even achieved the same record-breaking 40m television audience as
Obama for his convention speech.
Palin is getting nonstop coaching on the campaign trail to bring her up to
speed on policy before she has to tangle with Biden in next month’s
vice-presidential debate.
Steve Biegun, a former White House national security official, has been given
the task of prepping her on foreign policy – an area in which the Democrats
are hoping she will trip up but in which she could easily make Biden,
chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, look pompous.
John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations who met her
briefly in Alaska, said: “I thought she was very sharp. She was very
knowledgeable about missile defence – Alaska has missile interceptor bases
which are on a trajectory from North Korea.”
To be on the safe side, so many aides are involved in briefing her that
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s chief policy adviser, joked: “That McCain guy
is on his own.”
That is certainly how it looked in St Paul, where Palin had all the best
applause lines in her speech while McCain was left to give a lacklustre
presentation in front of an unflattering green screen.
How much of a boost McCain will get from his convention remains to be seen.
The figures thus far show that he has arrested Obama’s progress and returned
the race to a near dead heat, where it was on the eve of the convention
season.
According to one poll, 58% of voters have a favourable opinion of Palin, a
marginally higher rating than Obama and McCain on 57%; 60% approved of her
speech.
Focus groups have revealed her to be “authentic, independent and strong”. Yet
she is also a polarising figure, as Murphy suggested. A Gallup poll last
week indicated that for every voter Palin attracted, she put another one
off. Her convention speech, which was laced with sarcasm as well as genuine
wit, helped to define her among Democrats as a candidate of the hard right –
an image that might eventually turn independent voters off.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democratic Florida congress-woman, said: “There is
a great movement on the extreme right-wing fringe for Sarah Palin but not in
the country. She doesn’t support the right to choose [abortion] even in
cases of rape and incest. She doesn’t support stem cell research. She
doesn’t believe in equal pay for equal work.”
The Obamacons – Republican defectors to Obama – have shown no sign of
reconsidering their allegiance. Jeffrey Hart,a former speechwriter for
Ronald Reagan and former editor of the National Review, said: “I consider
Sarah Palin radically unacceptable.” He then criticised her for supporting
the teaching of intelligent design – a form of creationism – in schools,
believing the Iraq war was mandated by God and promoting abstinence in sex
education.
Critics of Palin have been amazed to find themselves called “sexist” by
Republicans who normally run a mile from feminism. Dr Laura Schlessinger, a
radio host and author of the bestselling The Proper Care and Feeding of
Husbands, was one of the few influential social conservatives to claim that
Palin was setting a poor example, although she said she would still support
McCain.
“But really, what kind of role model is a woman whose fifth child was recently
born with a serious issue, Down’s syndrome, and then goes back to the job of
governor within days of the birth?” Schlessinger wondered on her blog. “I am
haunted by the family pictures of the Palins during political photo-ops,
showing the eldest daughter, now pregnant with her own child, cuddling the
family’s newborn. If a child is rushed to hospital, and you are on the
hotline with both Israel and Iran as nuclear tempers are flaring, where’s
your attention going to be?”
That debate has now been shut down by Obama, the son of an teenage mother, as
well as by the Republicans. Palin not only survived the scrutiny of her
personal life last week, she triumphed.
The next test comes as independent swing voters decide whether she is one of
them ora radical social conservative. Only then will McCain know if she is
his saviour or nemesis.
