Polls: Gallup's tracking poll, obviously not yet able to respond to Sarah Palin's hugely well-received debut last night, has Obama leading 49% to 43%. And a poll conducted for Emily's List suggests that only 9% of women who backed Hillary Clinton have switched to McCain because of the Palin pick — but again, before yesterday.
The evil liberal media are almost all agreed: Sarah Palin knocked it out of the park. Who knew the easiest way to get good coverage from the New York Times was to attack the New York Times? [New York Times]
Joe Klein has a good, pithy take: "The more I think about it, Palin's was an authentic, sarcastic, white working-class voice -- absent the economic pain at large in the country, the fact that median families have lost $2000 in disposable income during the Bush presidency. The Democrats are betting that the pain will trump the sarcasm this year; the media reaction you're seeing, including my own, comes from the knowledge that sarcasm has trumped pain so often in recent history." [Swampland]
And there's nothing short of rapture among that portion of the Washington establishment that likes to congratulate itself, over drinks in some bar on Capitol Hill, that it understands Ordinary America. Bill Kristol hails Palin's "stunning success" , saying she poses a threat to the Democrats' "broader claims to speak for youth, for women, and for the future, and a threat to their attempt to control the high ground in the culture war." Larry Kudlow thinks Palin might be a "Western frontier version of Thatcher". Fred Barnes agrees. And Mark Steyn is in a reverie.
That said, there were a high number of decidedly shaky "facts" in Palin's barnstorming speech. [CBS Political Animal, Reality-Based Community]
...and the script had to remind her to pronounce "nuclear" as "new-clear". [The New Republic]
...and she never mentioned her positions on abortion or gun rights. [Politico]
The Republicans now plan to send her to campaign in parts of the country where McCain is weak, and right-wing groups are queuing up to have her come and speak. [Marc Ambinder]
All of which puts a lot of pressure on John McCain to deliver the speech of his career tonight. The Washington Post says he will "seek to recast the Republican Party's brand in his own maverick image, staking his claim to the presidency on a depiction of himself as a political renegade in an attempt to overcome what he will paint as his opponent's more ephemeral call for change." [Washington Post]
Across the river, while all this was going on, police in Minneapolis arrested more than 100 people after a Rage Against The Machine concert. [St Paul Pioneer Press]
