I was born and raised in Nebraska, and my wife grew up on a farm her brother and father still live on. It's four miles away from Westboro, MO, a town whose population has sunk below 200 many years ago. Before being pulled to the Washington, D.C. area because of my work a few years back, my wife and I had never lived in a town over the size of 200,000, and we're still most at home when hanging out with the family and friends back home at small-town cafes and restaurants that were favorite haunts as we were growing up. My brother is a Methodist minister serving a church in Lincoln now, but I miss the days when we could drive out to visit him in churches in places like Mullen, North Platte and Broken Bow, Nebraska.
I go through all this biographical background as a way of getting to this point: while I appreciated Sarah Palin's tribute to small-town values at one point in her speech, the values she exhibited in the rest of the speech were not the ones I recognized from the small towns I know. Her sarcasm, even downright nastiness at times, is not representative of the people I grew up with and still love.
My first instinct was that Palin would survive all the revelations and give a strong Checkers-esque speech tonight, but that the drip, drip, dripping away of nervous-making stuff about her will make her an on-going liability for the McCain ticket. My second instinct, seeing one new revelation after another over the last 48 hours, was that the Republicans just might have to dump her over the side.
I'm back to my first instinct. The right wing is rallying around her like she was Joan of Arc, and McCain would look downright goofy if he drops her now. The Republicans, absent some really huge new revelation, will defend her to the hilt, call any attackers sexist, and do their best to turn her into a martyr. And, frankly, the media has reached a saturation point where they have too much material to discuss related to Palin, so damaging new revelations aren't sinking in.
STATE BLOGS
