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Pondering Palin
This guitar kills liberals (and yes, we know it's a Photoshop job thank you)
The British press doesn't know what to make of Sarah Palin - or the people who will vote for McCain because of her.
John McCain's choice of running mate was greeted with surprise and some amusement in the UK papers. Here was a woman who kills her own food "just a heartbeat away" (to use the favoured cliche) from the most powerful office in the world. Indeed, her unnervingly intense smile hinted that she might not even need a gun.
Then came the laughter: Rumours of skeletons in the family cupboard, whispers of book-banning and creationist education, a belief in abstinence teaching which obviously fell on deaf ears, as it was announced that her 17 year old daughter had managed to get herself knocked up by the school hockey jock. Then worse gossip began to swirl around the candidate... what had McCain done? Hadn't the Vet done some vetting?
The fundamentalist headbangers who McCain was angling for when he chose Palin aren't going to buy this woman, the UK press argued. But their amused skepticism quickly turned to dread.
Palin played what was widely received as a blinder at the Republican convention. Her speech was watched by nearly as many Americans as Barack Obama had attracted a week before. From the unknown governor of an obscure town, she became a national figure. McCain got his "bounce" - one poll put him four points ahead of Obama.
The UK press, as ever, failed to understand the US electorate, and that part of it labelled as fundamentalist Christians in particular.
In some ways, the press has grown up since the 2004 election. The Guardian is highly unlikely to recommend that its readers write to voters in swing states urging them to vote for its preferred candidate, as it did, disastrously, in the last Presidential contest. Moreover, the newspaper wants to appear grown-up. Much of its readership (and that of other British media outlets, such as the BBC and The Times) is American, and in a competitive market, you can't write that people who vote for McCain-Palin are deluded and/or retarded, as was the case with the second Bush election. Like everyone else, Americans don't mind their own people targeting them for satire - US comedy is the best in the world - but they take rightful umbrage when foreigners have the gall to do it.
British commentators might think that anyone considering a vote for McCain-Palin is dangerously deluded, but they can't use mainstream news outlets to say it anymore. Besides, one can hardly rant about what idiots American Christians are when your newspaper's ethics demand that you treat other fundamentalist groups, often vastly more prejudiced than Christians, with the utmost respect and dignity.
Sadly this new spirit hasn't led to a better understanding of American Christians. Newspapers predicted that the purity-obsessed religious right wouldn't be swayed by Palin's candidacy - yet swayed they were. What British commentators often miss is that the sort of people who make up many US congregations turn to faith for comfort when life deals them a lousy hand.
The British press likes to depict evangelical Christians as a morally uniform inquisition, a white Taliban marching across the South and MidWest browbeating divorcees, burning books and forcing children into creepy virginity pledges.
They're wrong. These people sometimes come from modest backgrounds, where poverty was always close. They may have children who get pregnant young; they may have had affairs, or have come from broken homes. Their husbands or fathers might have knocked them about, or they may have suffered from the effects of alcoholism or drug abuse. In short - and at the risk of making them sound like the subject of a country and western song - they're human, they've lived, and they go to church for understanding, support and (in some cases) forgiveness.
Simon Tisdall examines the mood in the Guardian. While he's mainly observing how the papers on the east and west coasts are guilty of underestimating Mrs Palin and her likely impact, one can't help but detect a crestfallen tone, the realisation that McCain's campaign has finally found the key to unlock the firmly closed chastity belt of the religious right's election-winning machine.
Conservative commentators paint a rosier picture, understandably. While few British commentators have shown any real enthusiasm for John McCain (the man's a fervent Euro-federalist, one observer complained), Sarah Palin - or the left's dismayed response to her - has sparked them to life. James Bennett writes of her record in Alaska, depicting her as a smooth and ruthless political operator, more a small town Sarkozy than the ingenue she has been painted elsewhere.
In the Independent, Dominic Lawson tells his left-wing readers that they have been "floored" by Palin. Lawson argues that the left tends to view right-wingers as stupid, underestimating them and inviting the scorn of voters. He compares Palin to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in this respect: Comparisons which will do Mrs Palin no harm, should her supporters care to read the Independent.
"Vice Presidents don't win elections", runs the mantra uttered by Democrats following Obama's promotion of the uninspiring Joe Biden. The line was swiftly recycled in an attempt to calm the troops following Sarah Palin's barnstorming speech. Wonder if Palin will prove an exception to this rule, as she has for so much else?
