Update: Sarah Palin live on Saturday Night Live (Oct 18).
At American Thinker, Kyle Anne Shiver contends that Palin Has Everything That Counts [click on link for full article]:
For all the talk about the smallness of the governments Mrs. Palin has run successfully, one might get the idea that it’s harder to sit among a large group of Senators on the Hill in Washington, D.C. than being on the hot seat all along in a mayor or governor’s office.
Well, that’s pure poppycock.
We don’t need any more proof than the recent revelations of hidden-in-plain-sight shenanigans of Congress — up to their eyeballs in Freddie/Fannie corruption! - to know which job is hardest. It’s a whole lot more difficult to be constantly exposed to watchful constituents in one’s own hometown and state, than it is to be ensconced on the Hill hundreds or thousands of miles from the taxpayers.
To listen to Governor Palin’s critics lately, though, one might imagine that none of her real accomplishments, nor the honesty and integrity evidenced by Mrs. Palin in office, actually count any more. Sarah Palin has proven her qualifications by actually making decisions that have borne real fruit — results. And proven results certainly matter to me.
When I saw Sarah Palin make her national debut at the RNC convention, and again in her first major debate last night, I found her to be quite the American version of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher, too, faced scathing derision from her country’s press and from her opposition, much of it focused on the issues of small town vs. big city and commoner vs. elite.
And, like Palin, Thatcher rose above it all with grace and made her case to the actual voters, who elected her again and again, until the Iron Lady became the longest sitting Prime Minister in more than a Century. What did Margaret Thatcher credit with her amazing success?
Thatcher said simply, in much the way I expect Sarah Palin will:
“I just owe almost everything to my father and it’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.”
And as the first female Prime Minister of England, Margaret Thatcher, also said, “Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.” Then, she set about proving her own words true.
There’s a page on debate reactions at The Anchoress:
I thought both debaters helped their candidates a bit tonight, and I will always like Joe Biden, but I will call Palin the winner, first because she had to prove she is not the caricature being developed by the media, and she did that, but also because of the stunning consensus of the Frank Luntz audience in St. Louis, who declared her the hands-down winner and expressed a real connection. When I saw that audience response to Palin I thought: here in a nutshell is why the other side has worked so vociferously to destroy her, so quickly. What the folks in St. Louis were talking about tonight (and they said they now thought she was “qualified” to be president) is what Camille Paglia saw in Palin’s first, informal speech at her introduction. Sarah Palin unfiltered, is a force to be reckoned with. I don’t know if we’ll see the major shift in polling, that Luntz predicted, though.
At Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes writes about Palin’s Comeback
The moment when Sarah Palin knew she was winning last night’s debate with her vice presidential opponent Joe Biden came after the subject had turned to nuclear weapons. Palin had talked about nukes as a deterrent and said it was important to keep them out of the hands of dictators who are enemies of America. Then she turned to moderator Gwen Ifill and asked, “Can we talk about Afghanistan real quick?”
Afghanistan? The impression Palin had left in television interviews with ABC’s Charles Gibson and CBS’s Katie Couric was that she was ill-equipped to discuss issues like that. She just didn’t know enough to talk about foreign policy and other weighty matters with even a minimal level of comfort. And this meant she simply wasn’t up to being vice president should John McCain win the presidency.
But by that point in the debate-two-thirds the way through-Palin was brimming with self-confidence. She knew she could handle any issue likely to be thrown at her by Ifill. She knew Biden would not outmatch her. So she purposely tackled an issue on which he was expected to have an advantage.
He didn’t. She insisted the “surge principles” that had proved effective in Iraq would work in Afghanistan. Biden claimed the commanding general in Afghanistan disagreed. Then Palin said, no, the general didn’t disagree, and she spelled out how “the counterinsurgency strategy” favored by McCain (and her) would work.
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