Across the pond

Make no mistake about it.  Sarah Palin electrified the Democratic Convention in her 36 minute speech yesterday and dominated the prime time television screens. No matter that her speech was crafted by the Republican speech writers, she made it her own, and delivered it with great panache. Her opening quip brought the house down.

What’s the difference between hockey mum and a pit bull. Lipstick.

As she delivered the punch line, she drew her hand across her lips and smiled. And then she proceeded to cut Barack Obama’s throat.  Belittling his experience as a community organiser in Chicago, compared with her own as a small town mayor. Turning his own jibe alleging that John McCain would not follow Osama bin Laden into his cave, by saying Obama wants to offer him a place at table.

She is more Annie Oakley than Margaret Thatcher. She shoots from the hip better than most of the boys, but underneath she has a heart of gold, bringing up her disabled child, standing by her daughter who has failed to follow her own injunction about no sex before marriage. And watching the convention scene yesterday it was like a Hollywood movie with the enormous McCain and Palin families hugging each other with abandon.

The main thrust of the attack was on the Democrats as the party of the elite and she included the media as part of that elite. She portrayed herself,  accurately,  as the outsider, the woman from the small town and the small state, who understood the people of America better than those who had spent most of their lives in Washington.

This line of attack is full of contradictions. Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, is very much a Washington insider, but then so is John McCain.  And although Barack Obama can be portrayed as a member of the East Coast elite, given that he has spent most of his working life as a teacher at Harvard, the fact that he comes from a background quite as humble as that of Palin is self-evident.

And the Republicans cannot have it both ways. Their attack on Obama for most of this campaign, and again yesterday, is that Obama lacks experience. That he is new to Washington and has not yet managed to get any new laws passed in his short time as a Senator in Washington. Moreover, the Republicans have continually tried to portray Obama and his wife, Michelle, as somehow not fully American, which taps into racial prejudices. In other words he is the ultimate outsider.

They cannot have it both ways.

Yesterday’s speech makes it clear that Palin is going to be a big factor in this campaign. And what her speech makes clear is the battle in one very important sense is going to between her and Barack Obama.

There are huge differences between them. And those differences are about belief and policies. Obama is on the left of his party.  Palin is part of the right wing moral minority which brought George Bush to power.  Unlike Margaret Thatcher, who defeated Ted Heath and reshaped the Conservative Party in her own image, Palin stands for another four years of Bushism.

John McCain may yet come to regret that he did not push harder for his friend, Joe Lieberman, or go along with one of safer Republican leaders.

Photograph: Associated Press