GUEST BLOGGER: I Loved Palin's Speech - Too Bad It Was a Disaster

[Sometimes I run across original research or information that is exactly the kind of stuff I live for - well thought out, well written, well researched commentary, the kind that your media experts get by the pound but think is too much for you to understand. The author, like many bloggers, has a need to keep his avocation under the radar for professional reasons. As he explains below, he goes by the name thereisnospoon at the progressive political website DailyKos, where we are both active members of the community. He has given me permission to publish his comments in their entirety. Enjoy]


I loved Sarah Palin's speech last night. No, really, I did. As a student of rhetoric, I couldn't help but admire the poise, the confident delivery of cutting lines read with a smile, the deft moves from pulling the heartstrings with family stories to clever jokes about hockey moms and pitbulls to biting invective at political opponents.

It was a speech in the best Ciceronian tradition, delivered not with stentorian bombast but with the charm of your small-town neighbor and the visual appeal of a celebrity actress.

And it was an utter, unqualified failure. As with so much else in her life, Palin may have gained greatly from her performance, leaving her a force to be reckoned with for years to come (assuming her myriad personal and political scandals don't sink her first), but she probably just hurt McCain's chances in 2008 as surely as she hurts everything else she touches.

Already the results of two focus group projects in different places (Nevada and Michigan) already strongly suggest that Palin did not sway the independents or the Clinton supporters that she needed to in order to overcome their concerns about her experience. Thing is, that shouldn't have come as any surprise to anyone who has ever done a political focus group this election season.

You see, I moderate focus groups for a living--mostly on the corporate side, but with some political work thrown in. I've done a couple of projects for non-partisan 527s and NGOs who are nonetheless on the progressive side, talking about what matters this election season. I was a precinct captain for the Obama campaign, talking to conservative Dems and independents. I also live in a Republican district, and don't miss an opportunity to talk to regular voters about what's on their minds. And anybody with half a brain who does this for a living could have told you that Palin's speech wouldn't work to persuade the independents and Clinton supporters McCain needs.

Without revealing too much (my clients' research results are proprietary), what I can tell you without hesitation are four universal factors:

1. Most importantly, times are too tough and the public too worried about their economic security to sweat the small stuff.

2. Issues trump personality this year. I know we say this every election cycle, but it really is true this year. People are apprehensive about the issues, and they're paying more attention than ever. Allow me to give you a quote from a Republican I talked to in a focus group setting:

"I like McCain personally. He's a war hero. I would have voted for him eight years ago, four years ago. But the issues are way too important now. People are in trouble."

3. Voters have very low tolerance for partisan red meat this year. This cuts both ways: voters no more want to hear about the reasons we got into Iraq (though many acknowledge it was for oil) than they want to hear about God, guns or gays. They want solutions.

4. Economics trumps all. Only in the Midwest Mountain West does Iraq play even a close second fiddle to economic concerns. Voters want solutions to stagnant wages, massive debts, gas prices, healthcare and a host of other economic concerns. They're sinking, and they want the government to do something.

By all four of those measures, Sarah Palin's speech was an absolute disaster.


1. In an election where the voters find "small" unappealing and want big, bold solutions to weighty problems, Palin's speech did little but extol the virtues of small: small towns, small government, small-scale issues and small-ball politics. She gave voters nothing profound, no inventive solutions or even inventive perspectives. At the end of the day, voters still had no idea what she would do to solve their problems.

In fact, she did spend an inordinate amount of time criticizing Democrats for wanting to increase the size of government. In an environment where voters are worried that politicians are selling out government infrastructure and not paying attention to job losses, and where "high taxes" don't even break the top five issues, selling the governor's plane on eBay and firing the governor's cook aren't exactly selling points.

2. As a personality on stage, she was terrific. Too bad voters aren't really that interested in personality this year. They want problems solved, they want change and they want answers. Sarah Palin talked a lot about her family and her values, but she provided no answers and talked very little about the issues that matter most to Americans.

3. It was a great piece of Ciceronian oratory--but like most Ciceronian oratory, it was nasty, cutting, vicious and full of divisive red meat. It was exactly the sort of grating partisan rhetoric that voters have said repeatedly they are turned off by.

4. Outside of oil drilling, there was almost nothing about core economic issues in her speech. In fact, they were so assiduously avoided that I can't help but wonder if independent voters felt almost insulted by the nonchalance of it all. Coupled with Rudy 9/11's rhetoric about "giving workers the right to work", Republicans clearly have no understanding what the problem is. It's not that workers can't necessarily find jobs (though that can be a problem depending on the community): it's that the jobs they can find don't pay enough to cover the bills.

What she did manage to do without a doubt is motivate and mobilize to a certain degree the evangelical base. But Republicans must take that for granted, else Obama will win in a devastating landslide. What the Palin pick was designed to do was appeal to independents and to Hillary's voters. By that measure, I'm almost certain that she flopped terribly. I could be horribly wrong, of course, but already the data are appearing to bear me out.

Of course, insofar as the speech was written for her she may escape much of the blame for this debacle. But that doesn't matter now: she gave the speech. She owns it.

And now the GOP will get to pay the price.

Elephant In The Room Last Night Not GOP Mascot

Rudy Giuliani spoke so long I dozed off before he finished his speech. By the time I woke up, Sarah Palin’s family was on stage. Luckily, I had my trusty “REWIND” button, but since I didn’t record the action at Wednesday night’s Republican National Convention, it only went back about two thirds of the way into Sarah Palin’s address.

The camera had stopped at Bristol Palin, the unmarried pregnant teenage daughter of the woman speaking on stage. Was that an elephant in the Xcel Center that I heard rustling around? Or was it the awkward, stilted cone of moral exemption that had descended around the teenaged Palin’s pregnancy?

Sarah Palin looked good, with the kind of well defined cheekbones and clear skin that were made for high definition television. Her delivery wasn’t as energetic as the Sarah Palin I’d seen on clips from past engagements, but it was more than adequate when contrasted with the rest of the speaking slate last night. Most of all, she looked more comfortable the longer she talked, her eyes beginning to flash as she started tearing away at Barack Obama.

The thing that lingered on my mind, though, wasn’t Palin’s voice, but a picture I’d seen earlier on another website. Two teenaged looking girls, one white, one black, were shown side by side, both of them in despair as their at-home pregnancy tests shoed them positive results. The adjectives that were superimposed over the white girl’s image were some of the same ones used this week to describe Bristol Palin, the pregnant 17 year old daughter of vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. I saw this picture every time the camera swung to Bristol’s face during the speech, wondering how morality had now become a "situational" premise.


I pushed the “LIVE” button and S. and I watched the recap by the old faithful at CNN. I flipped to Leno on NBC when the roll call voted – the only real reason we were up this late was to see Larry King Live.

Leno's observation, repeated several times, that the audience was practically all white, was something the mainstream news media was studiously trying to avoid mentioning. “The reason why Governor Palin looked so comfortable on stage was, when she stood behind the podium and looked out where the audience was supposed to be was because it was all white - she thought she was back in the snow in Alaska.”

Leno deftly used another comedy bit to illustrate why this image looked so yesteryear when he flashed the picture of GOP entertainment from the old days. But that didn’t have my attention as much as the elephant in the room did. I could hear her rustling around, could feel her ponderous bulk as she kneeled down.

When Leno’s jokes petered out, I flipped back to CNN, where they were just getting Larry King’s show on the air. As we sat there, watching the people on the Larry King panel make comments, I turned to S. "I just put my finger on what Palin’s speech reminded me of. It was the student council conventions I used to go too. We knew the text, we sounded enthusiastic, but the speeches themselves sounded like we were saying someone else's words." The women on the Larry King panel – all white, all middle-aged, all Democratic Party supporters – had quite a bit of fire in their eyes. But to a woman, they all stayed well clear of Bristol Palin, circling their wagons around the stance Sarah Palin took on the issues instead.

Sarah Palin, it appears, doesn’t seem like she's going to be a real problem for Obama. Until McCain picked Palin, a lot of his party faithful were on the fence about him. So far, she is basically shoring up his support among the people he was supposed to already have, with limited avenues to appeal to anyone who does not share her views. For all the hoopla over Palin, both parties are still wrestling over who will get a bigger percentage of the sliver of undecided voters and those voters who are apt to change their minds. Registering new voters may be more labor intensive and and sound less exciting than the latest soundbite, but in November, its the number of fingers pushing those buttons that will count the most

All this time I was thinking this, though, that damn elephant was still bothering me. Maybe, I said to myself, this is a trained elephant. Maybe trained elephants know how to take up less room. Maybe they have mastered the art of being light on their feet. And maybe they have a special place on their trunk that you rub to make them kneel down behind you before you give your mother’s new boss a hug.

Maybe that’s what young, black, unmarried teenaged mothers need, I mused to myself – their own elephant trainers.