Hans Rustad David Brooks har noen vurderinger av Sarah Palin: det oppsiktsvekkende er kulturendringene. Det ville vært utenkelig for Geraldine Ferraro å opptre så frekt og direkte som Palin gjorde mot Joe Biden. Palin profiterer på at stilen er blitt avslappet, uformell. Hun er konservativ, men utradisjonell.
Palin er kristen, men hun snakker helt annerledes enn vi er vant til. Hun snakker om «balls», og det får Associated Press til å skrive …. og i klamme (et ord for en mannlig kroppsdel under beltestedet). Virkelig. Ordet balls er for sterkt for dem, men ikke for Palin. Denne direktheten overfor hykleriet var tidligere de radikales forte. Nå kommer den fra en hocekymom fra Alaska, en pitbull med lebestift, som er superpatriot. Det stemmer ikke med skjema og grasrota er vilt begeistret. Selv NRKs Anette Groth måtte lage en respektfull reportasje om hockeymoms.
Their primal need for political survival having been satisfied, her supporters then looked for her to shift the momentum. And here we come to the interesting cultural question posed by her performance. The presidency and the vice presidency once was the preserve of white men in suits. As Ellen Fitzpatrick pointed out on PBS on Thursday night, if, in 1984, Geraldine Ferraro had spoken in the relentlessly folksy tones that Palin used, she would have been hounded out of politics as fundamentally unserious.
But that was before casual Fridays, boxers or briefs and T-shirt-clad Silicon Valley executives. Today, Palin could hit those colloquial notes again and again, and it is not automatically disqualifying.
On Thursday night, Palin took her inexperience and made a mansion out of it. From her first «Nice to meet you; may I call you Joe?» she made it abundantly, unstoppably and relentlessly clear that she was not of Washington, did not admire Washington and knew little about Washington. She ran not only against Washington, but the whole East Coast, just to be safe.
To many ears, her accent, her colloquialisms and her constant invocations of the accoutrements of everyday life will seem cloying. But in the casual parts of the country, I suspect, it went down fine. In any case, that’s who Palin is.
On matters of substance, her main accomplishment was to completely sever ties to the Bush administration. She treated Bush as some historical curiosity from the distant past. Beyond that, Palin broke no new ground, though she toured the landscape of McCain policy positions with surprising fluency.
Like the last debate, this one was surprisingly wonky – a lifetime subscription to Congressional Quarterly. Palin could not match Biden when it came to policy detail, but she never obviously floundered.
