As predicted, Sarah Palin delivered a star performance at the GOP Convention last night. She, with some help from Rudolph Giuliani, succeeded in turning the tables on the democrat punditocracy and making Obama’s lack of achievements, inexperience, and empty rhetoric the main issue of the campaign right now.

Giuliani’s line about how the democrat candidate talks about fighting for you, but there’s only one man in this race who has really fought for you was particularly a killer, as was his elaborate act of astonishment as he pretended to scrutinize Obama’s resume, and did a double-take over “community organizer.” Americans know what a “community organizer” is. A
community organizer is some upper middle class kid from an elite college who shows up in town to make trouble on behalf of the bums, because he understands that they are really victims of society and he is nobler and more sensitive than the rest of us.

Sarah Palin’s speech, personality, and amusing background seem likely to prove irresistible to the press. It’s her turn to be flavor-of-the-month. Her selection by McCain was nothing short of political genius, striking directly at the Obama phenomenon with what amounts to the perfect anti-Obama, an equally extraordinary personality able to come from nowhere directly to the center of the national political stage, who is also very articulate and charismatic, but female, authentically blue-collar, and (as Mark Steyn aptly put it) not only American, but hyper-American. She is the perfect foil to Obama. As a woman, she is breaking the glass ceiling Obama kept intact over Hillary’s head. She represents precisely the working class Americans essential for there to be any hope of democrats winning a presidential election, and she is not a Punahoa-cum-Harvard missionary come to save them, she is one of them. She is strongly associated with a series of diametrically opposite positions from the democrat party’s and Obama’s, with powerful blue-collar appeal: Right-to-Life, Gun Ownership, Hunting, Drilling for Oil.

How was it Karl Rove described Joe Biden? “Blowhard doofus,” wasn’t it? Biden is a self-congratulatory imbecile, with a conspicuous mean streak, who has a serious habit of putting his foot in his mouth. Sarah Palin debating Joe Biden? I wouldn’t want to be the democrat campaign guru trying to prep Biden for that one. It’s likely to get very ugly for Biden.

Democrats, in the final analysis, have nobody to blame but themselves. The US is a Center-Right country, featuring (let me whisper it to you, liberals) a predominantly average population which pays taxes and works for a living. You guys keep nominating the most liberal guy you can find, an elitist representing your own base of birkenstock-wearing socialists, tree-huggers, and Hollywood do-gooders. You think America vitally needs to be made a great deal more like France. You think we need to punish those hicks, rubes, and bitter gun-owners for their lack of fashion sense, and we need to make this a kinder, better world by taking money from the ignorant yahoos who worked for it and giving it to the needy at home and abroad. All of this seems as obvious to you as your own moral and cultural superiority to the uncouth primitives with whom an unkind Providence has condemned you to share the country. After all, they stole America from the Indians and they are guilty of the crime of Slavery, the central issue of human history, which invalidates their institutions, their way of life, and everything they stand for. Only through your leadership, by a series of essential sacrifices to the appropriate causes, can this wardrobe-and-cuisine-challenged, morally-disastrous nation possibly be saved.

All in all, for some mysterious reason, this particular viewpoint is less than attractive to ordinary Americans, and you keep losing elections.

This year, we have a war hero and beauty queen governor (who hunts) and you have a community organizer novice Senator with a record of two autobiographies and a speech running with the vainest and most arrogant airhead in the same body by his side. Your Crow Indian scouts are already painting their faces and singing their death songs, General Custer.