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.

The headline the Washington Post put on this one when they posted it on their political blog, “The Fix,” had to do with Rove’s projection that Sarah Palin will add 2-3 points to the GOP ticket (which, as he notes, could make a big difference in such a tight race), but there’s a lot more to his analysis than that; actually, this interview (about ten minutes long) with the folks from Newsweek is wide-ranging, and Rove has a number of interesting things to say. Whatever you think of the guy’s political morals, he’s a keen judge of the political landscape.

Reporter: Mr. McCain, how do you respond to charges that Palin has no experience?McCain: If Obama had as much experience as Ms. Palin, he’d be ready for the VP slot, too.Good line, and the right tack to take. (HT: Dr. Melissa Clouthier)

I posted a couple weeks ago about the attempt by disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters to challenge Barack Obama’s citizenship status, or something (I never was quite clear on what exactly they thought they were going to prove), and my amazement at how crazy some folks get about politics these days; but what’s going on now as certain elements on the Left try to destroy Sarah Palin (there’s no other word for it) far exceeds that for sheer malignant looniness.The craziest, and ugliest, is the attempt by denizens of the Democratic Underground (way underground, folks, with this one) and Daily Kos to claim that Trig Palin isn’t the governor’s son, but in fact her grandson, and that she faked her own pregnancy to cover up her daughter’s. Their evidence? Gov. Palin didn’t show much (as some women don’t), and her daughter Bristol was out of school with mono and looked a little chubbier. That’s it. The funny thing about this attempt at political assassination is that previously, Palin-haters have criticized her for putting politics ahead of the life of her son, traveling too late into her pregnancy—her water actually broke when she was in Dallas for a governor’s conference, and she didn’t immediately go to the hospital, but instead flew back to Anchorage; now, those who want to tear her down are forced to argue that she faked the whole episode. Which is crazy, because if in fact her pregnancy was a charade, what would adding to the charade accomplish except to create a whole new set of doctors who could testify that she wasn’t pregnant? The whole thing is completely nuts; it will be a sad day in American politics if Gov. Palin is forced to release her medical records to disprove it.Next to that, the garden-variety sexism of CNN reporter John Roberts seems almost wholesome. In case you missed that story, he was the one who wondered on air if it was irresponsible of Gov. Palin to run for Vice President when she has an infant with Down Syndrome. The question clearly floored his colleague, Dana Bash; in reply, she raised an important question: “I guess—my guess is that, perhaps, the line inside the McCain campaign would be, if it were a man being picked who also had a baby, but—you know, four months ago with Down’s Syndrome, would you ask the same question?” Somehow, I don’t think so.Driving this, I think, is rage that the GOP (in the person of John McCain) had the sheer gall to pick a VP nominee who’s a woman who’s off the (Democratic) reservation. I heard some of that even in Rebecca Traister’s piece in Salon, and I’ve heard a fair bit more elsewhere. We’re seeing, I think, the true heart of a lot of liberal feminism. It doesn’t matter to them that she’s a woman with a chance to make history; if anything, that makes it worse—she’s not just a normal infidel, she’s an apostate and a traitor, and so must be destroyed. The fact that someone would actually write this (on DU, quoted here) sums it up:

I will attack her for whatever reason suits the purpose of making her look bad to my audience.When I am among secular people I will attack her for being a religious zealot. When I am among people from church, I will attack her for being of a heterodox denomination. When I am among liberals I will attack her for her conservative views. When I am among conservatives I will attack her for her for anything they are prove to view as shortcomings in ideology. When I am among women, I will deride the obvious pandering of her nomination and the fact that McCain must not think much of womens’ [sic] intelligence, when I am among conservative men who dislike women in authority, I will rub their noses in it.If I can attack her for opposite reasons over the course of an afternoon, I will consider it an accomplishment.Same goes for Johnny Boy.

That’s hatred—flat out, pure, triple-distilled, 200 proof, weapons-grade hatred. That’s ugly.

There are a lot of folks raising the concern with Gov. Palin that, as a newcomer to national politics, she’s likely to make mistakes, and if she does, she’ll be hammered for them by the liberal media and end up a drag on the ticket. Jonah Goldberg put it this way:

I’ve been thinking about it and I think the bottom line on Palin is pretty simple. If she does a good job at the convention and survives about three weeks of serious media scrutiny—no horrible gaffes, no unforgivable I-don’t-knows to gotchya questions (fair and unfair), no botched hostile interviews—she will emerge as the single most inspired VP pick in modern memory and she will give the Democrats migraines for a long time to come, assuming there are no terrible skeletons we don’t know about. But, if she screws up in the next three weeks, gives the press and the late night comedians sufficient fodder to Quayelize her, she’ll be seen as anything from a liability to an outright horrible pick. That’s it.

For my part, I’d been agreeing with this analysis—confident that Gov. Palin will do well, but still in agreement with the consequences if she doesn’t. Now, however, I’m not so sure. Think about it: why did Dan Quayle get Quayled? George W. Bush didn’t see a similar media reaction bury him, and he and the English language have a considerably tenser relationship. I think the answer is that it wasn’t only Democrats who thought Quayle was a lightweight and not worthy of his position: Republicans didn’t either. When Bentsen hit him with the “you’re no Jack Kennedy” right cross and he went down for the count, his own party believed he belonged on the mat. That’s what was fatal to him. With W., that didn’t happen, and so he won two terms in the White House even as every comedian in the nation painted him as an ape in a dunce cap who couldn’t spell his own name if you spotted him the “B”and the “u.”This is, I think, relevant to our evaluation of Sarah Palin. Consider that unlike Sen. Quayle, she has evoked a deep and impassioned positive response from national Republicans; Jonah Goldberg (again) is representative on this:

Whatever else you want to say about Palin, the undeniable fact is that she has generated staggering enthusiasm among Republicans. Every few minutes I get another email like this:

Jonah,
Three days ago, I was telling my fiance that I might stay home in November. I could never vote for Obama, and there were things McCain could do (such as a VP pick) that would prevent me from voting for him.Well, I did it. Today I made my first ever political contribution, and it was to the McCain-PALIN campaign. I’m sold on Palin. And since he picked her, I’m now sold on McCain too.Sincerely,
[name withheld]

This is profoundly significant, because it means that if she does put her foot in it and give the media the opportunity to label her a lightweight, out of her depth—I’ll be surprised if she does, but even the best of us do it at the worst of times—Republican voters aren’t going to buy the line. Instead, we’ll defend her against it to anyone who will listen, and some people will. Would a gaffe or two on her part deflate the campaign somewhat? Sure, just as Sen. Obama’s have deflated his somewhat. As long as she keeps her cool, though, I just don’t see it knocking her or the ticket as a whole off their stride.

Well, things have calmed down considerably since yesterday’s spike (more hits in one day than I’ve ever had in a month; from what I can see, this was pretty common among pro-Palin sites, as the Net went crazy with people trying to find out who the heck is Gov. Sarah Palin), but the traffic is still running pretty high; and there seem to be two real themes here. First, people looking for dirt on Gov. Palin. Sorry, nothing there but the accusation that she abused the powers of her office in an attempt to get someone to fire her brother-in-law the child-tasering state trooper who drinks beer in his police car and threatened to kill her father—an accusation which a) doesn’t seem like much of an accusation (actually, getting the guy fired sounds like a pretty good idea to me), but b) doesn’t seem to be true anyway.Second, I continue to have crowds of folks land here searching for info on Sarah Palin’s church, religion, and the like: and for you, I now have an answer. Go here, scroll down to the seventh line, and you will know what churches Sarah Palin attends, or has attended.

The best media piece I’ve yet read on the Palin pick is Michael Medved’s. For the most part, he makes the same points that those of us who’ve been agitating for Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket have been making for a while, but what really makes his analysis, I think, is this comment:

Yes, this undermines McCain’s future use of the experience issue, but that’s almost certainly a good thing, too. The experience issue has never worked well in presidential elections: Gerald Ford tried it against a one-term Governor of Georgia (the worthless Jimmy Carter) and lost; Carter tried it against Reagan (no foreign policy experience as Governor of California!) and got wiped out; George H.W. Bush tried to make it stick against Bill Clinton and the result was the lowest percentage of the vote for a Republican candidate since Wiliam Howard Taft. The line McCain’s been using “He’s Not Ready to Lead” is still viable—and should emphasize a discussion of Obama’s policies, not his job history—his radicalism, not his resume. Meanwhile, we should invite comparisons of Governor Palin’s experience with Obama’s: won’t the PTA connect more with middle class voters than “community organizer,” and property tax-cutting small town mayor count more than slippery State Senator who voted “present” a disquieting proportion of the time. In any event, both tickets now balance experience with youthful energy—but McCain is balancing it the right way, with the experience at the top.

I think this is right on target, for two reasons. In the first place, every Democratic soundbite against Gov. Palin on the experience issue is also a soundbite against Barack Obama. Charles Schumer, for instance, said this: “While Palin is a fine person, her lack of experience makes the thought of her assuming the presidency troubling.” OK, Senator, so riddle me this: doesn’t that mean that Sen. Obama’s lack of experience makes the thought of him assuming the presidency troubling? After all, Gov. Palin has considerably more governance experience (technically, infinitely more, since Sen. Obama has none), and a considerably longer list of achievements to her name; how is it that her lack of experience troubles you, and his lack doesn’t? Check this out (HT: Carlos Echevarria):

Or, the thought strikes: does Sen. Schumer really mean (consciously or otherwise), “don’t worry about Sen. Obama’s inexperience—he’s just out front running the campaign; when it gets down to brass tacks, it will really be Uncle Joe running the show”? Is this a Freudian slip here? I’ve suspected for a while that that’s how the Democratic leadership on the Hill sees Sen. Obama; have we just seen that confirmed?In any case, going back to Medved’s point, prior to Steve Schmidt taking over to run the McCain effort, I remember seeing quizzical headlines asking, “Why is John McCain re-running the Hillary campaign,” pointing out as Medved does that running on “experience” doesn’t work well when your opponent is running on “hope” and “change.” The danger always was that Sen. McCain would lean on that too heavily—and now the presence of Gov. Palin on that ticket both makes that impossible and pulls the campaign back to a hope/change/reform emphasis of its own. The key now is to make the case that John McCain and Sarah Palin are experienced reformers who will put country first, working for the common good, serving the people above all. That, I think, is a message that works for them, since it fits what they’ve done in their careers, and what they care about as individuals; it’s a message they can back up from their own stories and their accomplishments in life; and it’s one that can win in November.