I have continued to be bothered by the attitude of the folks at PowerLine toward the Palin pick. I get that they’re Minnesotans who were really hoping to see Tim Pawlenty in that slot, but I think the disappointment is skewing their perspective; they’ve been veering unsteadily between appreciation and snide dismissal. Yesterday, for instance, Paul Mirengoff put up a post on Palinmania, a subject which I agree warrants self-reflection on the part of conservatives—but rather than addressing the real problem (the recurring temptation to put too much weight on and too much of our hope in politicians, who are, after all, merely human), he simply dismissed the phenomenon as ridiculous because focused on an “empty, or at least incomplete, vessel.” The implication, it seems to me, is that if John McCain had picked someone worthy for the slot (and you know whom they have in mind), the reaction might be reasonable; the problem is that Sarah Palin is unworthy.I now know that I’m not the only one who’s been bothered by their ongoing attitude; Beldar put up an excellent post this morning critiquing their complaints about the GOP response to Gov. Palin, a post which made several points that badly needed making; I hope they pay attention to what he has to say and re-evaluate their position.That said, I think there are a couple things which still need to be said, and both come down to another Paul Mirengoff post dismissing “the ‘Life Happens’ Republicans.” He concludes that post with the line, “The party has changed. It has become either less or more mature”—and from the tone and thrust of the preceding paragraphs, it’s clear that he’d vote for “less.” Though it’s a brief post, he manages to articulate three things which he holds up as signs of GOP immaturity. Taking the last one first, he writes,

The catch-phrase of the day seemed to be “life happens.” And indeed it does. But Republicans used to believe that the choices we make usually go a long way towards shaping the manner in which life happens, and that therefore indifference is not a fully appropriate response to bad choices.

This, I believe, is unfair—indeed, as unfair in its way as anything out of the liberal media. What exactly are the choices involved here? Let’s list them:

• Bristol Palin’s choice to have sex with her boyfriend, Levi Johnston
• Their decision to get married (which came before her pregnancy)
• Their decision, on her pregnancy, to keep the baby
• Todd and Sarah Palin’s decision to support their daughter and future son-in-law in their marriage and parenthood

Which of these choices was a bad choice? The first one. (Liberals would disagree, of course, but I’m not addressing liberals here.) Who made it? Bristol Palin. (And Levi Johnston, of course, but Gov. Palin didn’t raise him, so he may be considered outside the purview of anything reflecting on her.) In considering that, one might fairly say that “the choices we make usually go a long way towards shaping the manner in which life happens, and that therefore indifference is not a fully appropriate response to bad choices”; and if you look at the response which Bristol Palin made, and which her parents made, to that choice and its consequences, you can clearly see that Mirengoff’s snide “used to believe” is in fact unfair and unwarranted. Clearly, the Palin family firmly believes that “the choices we make usually go a long way towards shaping the manner in which life happens, and that therefore indifference is not a fully appropriate response to bad choices”—you can see that from the string of good choices Bristol Palin and her family made in response to the initial choice. And it’s to that that the GOP delegates were responding positively; painting their acknowledgement of the fact that “life happens” as “indifference . . . to bad choices” is simply wrong.Mirengoff’s uncharitable misreading of the GOP delegates’ charity and forbearance as immaturity is the thing that galls me most here, but it’s not the only thing. In the third paragraph of his post, he writes,

Many people here say they are looking forward to Palin’s debate with Talkin’ Joe Biden. They say that expectations will be low and there’s a good chance that Biden will come off as a bully. There was a time when Republicans would have been less delighted to be the party of low expectations, relying on a sympathy backlash.

(He also notes talk of a sympathy backlash with respect to Bristol Palin’s pregnancy.) If you want to blame anyone for teaching the party the political utility of low expectations, go look at George W. Bush, who found them very helpful in his debates with Al Gore. As for the whole “sympathy backlash” idea, that’s politics, and has been for a while now. What really gets me, though, is that last clause. There’s actually no suggestion in anything he reports that convention delegates were relying on a sympathy backlash for Gov. Palin in her debate with Sen. Biden; that’s his insertion. They understand, yes, the advantage of low expectations on the part of the press—but that doesn’t mean their own expectations for her performance are low. That’s Mirengoff reading his own low view of Gov. Palin into their comments.This assumes his initial complaint:

a vice presidential nominee who, given her credentials, would not (in my opinion) have rated ten minutes of consideration but for her gender.

I will grant that Gov. Palin doesn’t have a long résumé; but as Beldar pointed out here, she’s accomplished a great deal in her time as governor, and as he noted here, her service as chair and ethics commissioner on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission is in fact a major point on her résumé as well. He notes and comments on an article from the New York Times which highlights the fact that the governor of Alaska is perhaps the most powerful state executive in the country, as well as being the one who faces some of the greatest challenges. Further, as CinC of the Alaska National Guard (a role in which she has shone—see the video below), in pipeline negotiations involving Canada and fisheries matters in which Canada, Russia, Japan, and South Korea are concerned, she has far more foreign-policy experience than other governors. And then throw in the fact that everything Gov. Palin has accomplished, she has accomplished in the face of an extremely difficult political environment.All of which is to say: granting everything good about Gov. Pawlenty, what argument is there that he is more prepared or qualified to be VP except that he’s been governor longer? Considered carefully, even given her shorter tenure, I’m firmly convinced that her credentials alone warranted at least as much consideration as his did, even leaving aside her gender—and even leaving aside as well the fact that she’s a much more charismatic speaker and seems to match him (roughly, anyway) in other political skills. Three months ago, when I started looking closely into her record, her accomplishments blew away my initial concerns over her length of service, and I became firmly convinced that she was the best choice for VP; I think any impartial consideration of her record will at least concede that that was a fair and reasonable conclusion, both for me and for Sen. McCain.

HT for the video: Jennifer Rubin

Not that that’s news, of course, but it’s still interesting to see the effects quantified.

I’ve been talking up Sarah Palin for two and a half months now—long enough to have been ahead of the curve, if not truly an early adopter—laying out a long list of reasons why I believed she was the best pick as John McCain’s running mate; I never imagined I’d thought of them all, but I did think I’d hit all the high points.As it turns out, I was wrong. Blame it on the Y chromosome: I’m a guy, I miss things. I think I’m a reasonably attentive husband to my wife—we talk a lot, about a lot of different matters and issues, and believe it or not, I think I manage to listen about as often as I speak—but whatever she might tell me about her own experience, it’s still hers, not mine. I’ve never lived through junior high or high school as a girl (though my junior-high years were quite bad enough as they were, thanks), never been a daughter, never been a woman; clearly, from what I see and hear, it makes a difference, but I cannot know that difference from the inside. Even in our marriage, though we live life together and make decisions together, though I listen and seek to understand how it is for her each day and how she sees everything, I can only know her experience from the outside; I don’t feel it, I feel my own.Which means that when I started talking about the reasons why Sen. McCain should pick Gov. Palin, I missed one: identification. I missed the reaction of the women who are saying, “I am Sarah Palin. Her story is my story”—and there are enough that CafePress has put out a T-shirt. I missed the reaction and perspective of women like Annette Budd and Hope Reynolds and Dr. Melissa Clouthier (a bit of profanity there, just so you know) and, yes, my own wife and the women with whom she meets for playdates for our children. Like I said, I’m a guy—I didn’t know, didn’t see it coming. I’m learning.There’s a particular subset to this which may be especially important: Republican women. For one thing, they are the most likely to identify with Gov. Palin; as Will Wilkinson put it,

What they liked is that they saw a feminine yet powerful conservative Christian mother—someone they understand, someone they would like to have as a friend, someone they are or would like to be. What they liked was the thrill of such direct cultural identification, of being on that stage and commanding attention and respect. I do not doubt that conservative Christian moms all over the country were brought to tears by the power of this. There are a lot of conservative Christian moms.

And for the other, as Michelle Malkin notes, women who vote Republican have become wearily familiar with what she calls “the four stages of conservative female abuse”; but with the GOP putting one of their own front and center, and the media coming down on her in a fury like a Denali avalanche, it sounds like many of them have had it. Tom DeLay went so far as to say, “The media has done more for John McCain in the last two days than he’s done for himself in the last year and a half. Trashing her is waking up the sleeping giant, and the sleeping giant is Republican women.” I believed Gov. Palin would energize the GOP base in a way in which no one else could; it never occurred to me that the MSM would collude with her to help her do it. But that, if inadvertently, may be just what they’ve managed to do.One more crazy turn in this craziest of all political seasons.

I really and truly don’t want this blog to turn into “all Palin, all the time”—I have a number of other things I want to post on as well, and I do intend to get to them soon—but I also have a few more comments I want to make about Palin and the political situation as well. To start off with, though—how big of an effect did her speech have? Big enough that it’s impossible to keep on top of the response. So, in lieu of trying, I’ll simply point you to a couple places where you can find a lot of good material.

• The Anchoress has good links posts here, here, and here.
• RealClearPolitics, of course.
• The running blogs at Commentary, “Contentions,” and National Review, “The Corner.”
• Hugh Hewitt doesn’t have a lot up, but what he has up is prime.
• And of course, my fellow (and much more important) Palinite, Beldar.

John McCain has been vindicated; all of us who pushed for this pick have been vindicated; Gov. Sarah Palin hit a game-changing halfcourt shot with her speech, the Obama campaign is speechless, and “America has a new sweetheart.” Whether the media knew what a remarkable woman and politician Sen. McCain had found, he did, and so did we. To the slime peddlers and rumormongers, in case you didn’t get the memo, you aren’t going to be able to break this woman, so you might as well stop trying. All you’ve managed to do is hurt yourselves.The text of Gov. Palin’s speech is here; video is below.

“Stand Behind Sarah Palin.”

Some claim [John McCain] made a mistake in choosing the Alaska governor. My bet is the reverse—that she’ll turn out to be a big win. . . .Understand: Palin is under attack because she was such a good choice. Remember the Democrats’ central charge on McCain: “He’s a Bush clone.” By choosing Palin, something George Bush would never have done, McCain showed how really different he is. . . .Sarah Palin reinforces the most important aspect of the McCain candidacy: Despite 30 years in Washington, he’s an outsider and a dedicated foe of corruption and conflict of interest in government. He’s the one who stands up against pork, earmarks, and lobbyists and backs campaign-finance reform. Palin brings the same kind of credentials to the ticket. When she speaks tonight and emphasizes her record of reform and her commitment to bring ethical standards to Washington, she’ll strike a deeply resonant chord throughout the nation. None of the “scandal” reflects ill on Sarah herself. They’re the kind of family issues that bedevil many American women. That the media accords such prominence to them shows how fundamentally differently we treat women and men in politics. . . .Palin has an extensive public record—with more executive experience than Barack Obama or Joe Biden (or McCain, for that matter). She should be judged on her record, same as a man. If she is, she’ll survive these charges in great style. And then the backlash will set in. Tens of millions of women have had to confront life experiences akin to Palin’s. After years of electing plasticized creations of political consultants, we have the chance to vote for a real person with real peoples’ problems. In standing by her, McCain speaks volumes about his attitude toward women and his empathy for those who face family troubles. His loyalty illustrates not just his decency, but his sensitivity and good sense. All of which illustrates the most fundamental point of this convention: That John McCain is no George W. Bush.

The Democratic Party and their public-relations arm, the MSM, are trying to spin John McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin as a panic move; supposedly, in his panic, he rushed the pick without vetting her properly. Unfortunately for them, one of their own has already debunked that storyline. The Washington Post article chronicling the process that produced Sen. McCain’s decision makes it very clear that his vetting process was very thorough indeed. Along the way, it also makes it clear that he was interested in Palin not primarily because of her gender but because he saw her as a kindred spirit. (This fact worries David Brooks, who concludes from it that she too must not “have an explicit governing philosophy,” and that “she shares McCain’s primary weakness—that she has a tendency to substitute a moral philosophy for a political philosophy.” This makes him the first person to object to the Palin pick on the grounds that she isn’t conservative enough.) The McCain team knew all the issues with Gov. Palin, and judged them insufficient reason not to pick her.Should they have handled the issue of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy differently? John Hinderaker of PowerLine thinks so, arguing that “The time to bring it up was when Palin and her family were first introduced. Bristol was there, and it wouldn’t have been difficult to refer to her fiance, say that she is getting married in October or whatever, and that she will have a baby next winter. Sarah Palin could have added that this wasn’t how she and her husband planned it, but they like their new son-in-law and are totally supportive of their daughter.” OK, true, that would have defused the issue—but wouldn’t it also have defused the Dayton rally? Would that really have been the first impression they wanted to leave? Jennifer Rubin considers the possibility that, though the vicious rumors in the blogosphere changed the tone of the announcement, the timing might have been exactly what the McCain campaign planned all along:

Perhaps Palin was vetted, the problematic issues considered, and the problematic story rolled out on a holiday during a hurricane. That would be the model of competence—the last option, apparently, the MSM would consider as the logical explanation for the events of the last week.

Certainly, as Andrew Malcolm notes, the way the McCain campaign, in the person of campaign manager Steve Schmidt, handled the release of the information had all the appearance of a well-planned move:

It was a classic, illustrative and instructive case of political damage control. Weeks ago one of the first things out of Palin’s mouth when she met with the McCain campaign’s vice presidential vetter was word of her daughter’s condition and her husband’s DUI arrest in the 1980s. Schmidt has known since then that if his boss picked the Alaska governor as the running mate, it had better be the McCain campaign that got the bad news out. And got it out its own way at its own time.

There’s no denying that Labor Day and Gustav between them seem to have blunted the story, but much to the frustration of the MSM, so has the reaction of conservatives. Their problem is that they have no idea what Christian conservatives are actually like, only their own stereotypes of us, and so they expected the stereotype; what they got instead was the reality. Dr. James Dobson is all too often his own worst enemy in his public pronouncements, but his statement in this instance was a perfect example of Christian grace.As a result, the Left has taken its best shot, and most people seem to be looking at this as reason to empathize with the Palins rather than to condemn them; in consequence, Gov. Palin is still very much alive as a political force. A lot will ride on her acceptance speech tomorrow night, but that would be true anyway, and all the attention may only have served to attract even more people to watch. That ups the stakes, but there’s no reason to expect anything from Gov. Palin other than a strong performance. She speaks with both an attractive charm and a sense of serious purpose; she’s clearly a strong, capable woman who just gets the job done, and it comes through in her delivery. All she needs to do tomorrow night is the same thing she always does, and all will be well.Of course, it isn’t in their best interest to allow things to go that smoothly, and so they’re trying to find other charges against Gov. Palin that might actually stick. They’ve tried accusing her of being a past supporter of Pat Buchanan (aided by the fact, as one would expect, that he’s more than happy to claim her); unfortunately for him, his sister Bay doesn’t support his contention, and neither do the records. The charge has also been made that Gov. Palin was at one time a member of the Alaska Independence Party; the McCain campaign has refuted that as well. The media have tried to take a snippet of an interview she did with Larry Kudlow, in which she was dodging VP speculation, and make her look clueless; the charge is unreasonable. Barack Obama is insisting he wants to counter Gov. Palin on the issues, but some of his supporters are unwilling to take that risk, so they’re scrambling around to find some way, any way, to neutralize her by other means—even drawing on arguments they would normally condemn as sexist and demeaning to women—and at this point, it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll give up just because their tactics aren’t working.Unfortunately for them, that might not be a wise approach. The Obama campaign, including the senator himself, and several of his high-profile supporters have already opened themselves up to a charge of sexism from the McCain campaign (delivered, appropriately, by Carly Fiorina) for belittling Gov. Palin’s experience; they’ve also opened themselves up to comparisons between Gov. Palin and Sen. Obama, in which one can make a pretty good argument that Sen. Obama has even less meaningful experience than the woman whose experience he’s belittling (especially when you include all her experience, which he seems resistant to doing). Further, while it was a gracious and truly good thing for Sen. Obama to condemn those who were spreading lies about the Palin family, their dirty, hateful acts (along with the acts of violence committed against people traveling to the Republican convention) have nevertheless tarnished the image of the Obama campaign. (With friends like those, who needs enemies?) They’ve also reminded a lot of folks about Sen. Obama’s “punished with a baby” comment. As a consequence, if they move against Gov. Palin too aggressively, it’s likely to backfire.The problem for them is, there really are a lot of women out there who see themselves in Gov. Palin, who like her, and who don’t like what they’re seeing in response to her from the Left. As John Mark Reynolds writes,

[Palin] is a Renaissance woman, but for some bigots if that breadth of experience was not gained in paid employment or only in government than it counts less or does not count at all. That is offensive, though hard-working women like Palin mostly ignore it and cheerfully go on being awesomely competent.My wife is one of those millions of women and she sees in many sneers about Palin (reducing this brilliant woman to the “beauty queen”) yet another example of some peoples inability to value her experience. The Democratic Party should be warned that they are playing with electoral fire if they act as if all of Palin’s life experience is not of value. My wife will not get mad, but she is getting active.

The reactions of the McCain campaign have only reinforced this; when a reporter asked how Gov. Palin could serve as VP with “a new baby herself, and now she’s about to be a new grandmother trying to support a daughter giving birth to her own child,” Steve Schmidt shot back, “Frankly, I can’t imagine that question being asked of a man. A lot of women will find it offensive.” Clearly, they have no intention of letting the media or the Democratic Party treat her any differently than those folks would allow Republicans to treat a Democratic female candidate (and good for them, I say).Taken all in all, Janice Shaw Crouse concludes, the addition of Gov. Palin to the GOP ticket has “changed the 2008 election parameters,” flattening Sen. Obama’s expected convention bounce and generating a lot of money for the McCain/Palin ticket in the process. This gives Sen. McCain an opportunity, if he will take advantage of it with his speech on Thursday; when most expected his campaign to be dead by this point, if he’s able to generate a bounce, he could come out of the convention ahead—and from there it’s a mighty short sprint to the finish line.