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The Palin Rebound

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By DAVID BROOKS

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 5, 2008

There are some moments when members of a political movement come together as one, sharing the same thoughts, feeling the same emotions, breathing the same shallow breaths. One of those occasions occurred Thursday night when Republicans around the country crouched nervously behind their sofas, glimpsed out tentatively at their flat screens and gripped their beverages tightly as Sarah Palin walked onto the debate stage at Washington University in St. Louis.

There she was, resplendent in black, striding out like a power-walker, and greeting Joe Biden like an assertive salesman, first-naming him right off the bat.

Just as the mid-century psychologist Abraham Maslow predicted, Republicans watching the debate had a hierarchy of needs. First, they had a need for survival. Was this woman capable of completing an extemporaneous paragraph?

By the end of her opening answers, it was clear she would meet the test. She spoke with that calm, measured poise that marked her convention speech, not the panicked meanderings of her subsequent interviews.

When nervous, Palin has a tendency to over-enunciate her words like a graduate of the George W. Bush School of Oratory, but Thursday night she spoke like a normal person. It took her about 15 seconds to define her persona - the straight-talking mom from regular America - and it was immediately clear that the night would be filled with tales of soccer moms, hockey moms, Joe Sixpacks, Main Streeters, "you betchas" and "darn rights." Somewhere in heaven, Norman Rockwell is smiling.

With a bemused smile and a never-ending flow of words, she laid out her place on the ticket - as the fearless neighbor for the heartland bemused by the idiocies of Washington. Her perpetual smile served as foil to Biden's senatorial seriousness.

Where was this woman during her interview with Katie Couric?

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.

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.

Palin could not match Biden when it came to policy detail, but she never obviously floundered.

Biden, for his part, was smart, fluid and relentless. Still, this debate was about Sarah Palin. She held up her end of an energetic debate that gave voters a direct look at two competing philosophies.

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times.

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