It's been a week and a half since John McCain has chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate. In the media maelstrom that followed, there have been a few voices that have risen above the rest, for me. They seem to pick up threads of what I'm thinking and carry them through to completion, and, although I think that none of them is completely correct (an impossibility), all of them represent serious analysis. Putting them in order from most negative to most positive, from my point of view:
Charles Krauthammer presents a pessimistic view of McCain tossing the "experience" card and meeting Barack Obama on his home ground of "change." It's a huge gamble, he argues, and Sarah Palin, while talented, is a slender reed.
Kay Hymowitz of City Journal has interesting thoughts about "Red State Feminism," and captures the essence of how female power happens in the real world, away from the dystopian gender wars of liberal identity politics. A cautionary note at the end about excesses of "Palinsanity."
Kirsten Powers, who is a Democrat and a liberal, came off the blocks last week denouncing the MSM on the Sean Hannity show. She was livid at the treatment of Sarah Palin as a matter of principle, and her clear-headedness is noteworthy. She isn't a shill for Fox, and Fox News contributors were not 100% sanguine or even positive towards Sarah Palin (Mort Kondracke was notably personal, referring to her "stance on abstinence education and you see where that's got the daughter"). However, as she notes, if the mainstream press had deigned to open the Weekly Standard, they would have found out months ago that Palin was in the running.
Aside: About 20 minutes after Sarah Palin's blockbuster convention speech, CNN ran a segment on how to pronounce her name. The tease before the commercial mispronounced her name (rhymes with "gallon"), then, in a "we're so cute" segment with a witless male reporter, we were told that it took him four (count 'em: 4) days to find out how to pronounce her name. Do you suppose that no one, not a single effing person at CNN, or in all of his acquaintance, watched John McCain announce his running mate in Dayton? Did not CNN send a reporter there? Or, do they never, ever watch Fox News? The mind boggles. Almost 40 million people watched that speech, and a reasonable portion of them watched this idiot make a complete fool out of himself and his network. I suppose they thought they were going out on a limb by not completely trashing her. End aside.
Caroline Glick, a native Chicagoan and Israeli journalist, wrote a superb analysis in crisp, admiring prose, with a take about American culture that you rarely, rarely hear in the foreign press: John McCain- Master Strategist.
And finally, a friend of mine sent this to me several days ago, and I'll be darned if Rush Limbaugh didn't quote from it extensively today. The mysterious Spengler writes about Obama's intrinsic weakness, and how this foretold his failure as a candidate months ago. A sample of his (her?) take:
Combine a child's response to serial abandonment with the perspective of an
outsider, and Obama became an alien species against which American politics had
no natural defenses. He is a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans, in
but not of the American system. No country's politics depends more openly on
friendships than America's, yet Obama has not a single real friend, for he rose
so fast that all his acquaintances become rungs on the ladder of his ascent.
One human relationship crowds the others out of his life, his marriage to
Michelle, a strong, assertive and very angry woman.
[hat tips: nolon, DL, and JG: thanks to all]