#60 She is no Ronald Reagan. Give us a few weeks.

I didn't see all of Sarah Palin's "Reagan-esque" speech tonight, but I wasn't impressed by the clips and sound bites all the news stations replayed as her best moments. Of course, I was one of those few Americans who wasn't impressed by Ronald Reagan either. Give the man a script or even a few lines that he could memorize, and he became The Great Orator. Once he finished the script and was answering questions extemporaenously, he could barely garble two sentences together, much less a coherent thought. And people forget that the phrase "The Great Orator" was initially coined by the media ironically because of his INability to speak without a strong script in front of him or already memorized. The lesson is, beware of irony lest the American public AND subsequently even the media miss it and, instead, take it literally.

Actually, I suspect Sarah Palin, who is after all a University of Idaho graduate, can string sentences and thoughts together even without a script. And hence she is no Ronald Reagan. As an off-the-cuff speaker, she may be better, and that's something Joe Biden better be alert to when he enters their sole debate.

More importantly--to me, if not to the mass of American voters or to the media--what she said tonight can easily be turned against the Republican party: for just one example, the liberals ignoring the people in favor of their own agendas. [Q: Who in the past eight years of presidency and six of the past eight years in control of Congress passed tax breaks for the uber-wealthy and passed the cost on to the middle class?] [A: the Republicans]

Now it's time to give ourselves a few weeks to let the dust settle, to let the Republican ultra-right wing base enjoy its new hero, and let the polls reflect a bump for McCain as a result of Palin. It's actually, however, not a good thing for the presidential nominee to be overshadowed by his vice presidential running mate, to (pun intended) pale in comparison.

Before the election, people enamored of Sarah will come to remember that John is at the head of the ticket. Besides, I believe that James Carville is as right today as he was sixteen years ago: It is the economy that will finally drive the vote in this election. Once the media or the Democrats seize upon the paucity of fresh ideas in the Republican platform, especially to improve the status of the millions of Americans who are worse off today than they were four years ago (echoes of Ronald Reagan anyone?), the economy will trump the voting power of the energized Republican far-right base.

And then we have only latent racism to worry about. I hate to keep coming back to that idea, but I have no way of knowing if it's still out there waiting to influence votes, or just a throwback to the Pennsylvania Democratic primary which voters have gotten over.

I plan to sit back over the next two or three weeks, take a few long drives in a fuel-efficient car, watch some news but not enough to get upset, and then wait for the mid/late September poll results. By then, the effects of the conventions will have moderated, and perhaps the Republicans will decrease their pit bull attacks and increase their policy pronouncements. Now that would be a refreshing change.

Oh, by the way, in my list of tossup states, move Minnesota off of that list and onto the Democratic list. Without Pawlenty on the Republican ticket, I don't see MN going Red this year. That move won't change my projected electoral vote totals in my July 5 post, since I had--for electoral total purposes only--assigned all the tossup states to one or the other candidate, and I had put MN's ten votes in Obama's column. I just don't see it as much of a tossup anymore. Still Obama 301, McCain 237.

Have a good three weeks.

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