We don't know all we need to as yet about Sarah Palin, the jack-in-the-box vice presidential candidate John McCain sprung on his party, but we do know one thing for dead-cert sure: She can give one hellacious stemwinder of a political speech.
Palin turned what had been until then a desultory, almost apologetic Republican convention into a rafter-rattling crowd of happily whooping partisans.
She did it with welcome moments of comic relief, some of them becomingly self-deprecating but, alas, too often with the mockery and ridicule in which the current GOP, tutored by the splenetic Rush Limbaugh, has taken to addressing the electorate.
In Palin's telling, then, Barack Obama became a cartoon character, who instead of defeating terrorists wants to get them lawyers, ha ha. His post-graduate passage as a community organizer among laid-off workers became the stuff of disdain. And, of course, he will raise everybody's taxes, a hoary Republican trope and, in this case, pointedly not true.
Where McCain et al. had spent months sneering at Obama's invocations of hope and change, the pedal notes of his candidacy, now they claim both terms as the GOP's very own, as neat a piece of daylight robbery as you are ever likely to see.
And by the well-practiced Republican political alchemy, John McCain -- the son and grandson of admirals, who remarried rich -- becomes a man of the people and Obama, reared in decidedly modest circumstances, becomes elitist, specifically "cosmopolitan," about which there is apparently something odious.
This year's was a curious Republican convention. It elaborately avoided mentioning its antecedent Bush-Cheney administration. A providential hurricane provided an excuse for the president and vice president to absent themselves, and when political ancestry was invoked, the bloodline leaped from Ronald Reagan to McCain.
(Continuity with the current administration was acknowledged, and then just implicitly, mainly by Palin's presence, an oil woman as Bush and Cheney had both been oil men.)
