VOICES | Palin's convention speech: "Pretty Woman" for Christian conservatives

Everyone who has watched Sarah Palin up close, friend or foe, attests to what a quick study she is, so it’s no surprise that she read the speech handed to her with verve and moxie. Her performance last night was light years ahead of the one she delivered last week in Dayton, and the aplomb with which she donned her new suit of clothes fulfilled the rags to riches, Pretty Woman-for-Christians mythos that’s been bubbling up between the lines since Friday. In the scant few days since McCain tapped her and then disappeared her, Palin has let her hair down in more ways than one. She has learned to say “nuclear”–in Dayton on Friday, it was “nukular,” a la George W.–even if, as Josh Marshall pointed out, it took a phonetic prompt in her speech text to ensure she got it right.

No one knows what comes next with Palin, least of all the McCain campaign. It’s clear that McCain’s people didn’t really vet her in advance of naming her, a point underscored by the steady trickle of embarrassing revelations in the past few days: A Democratic opposition who went to consult the offline-only archives of her hometown Wasilla, Alaska newspaper was told that he was the first person to ask. Laura McGann of our sister site, Washington Independent, got the same response when she phoned the Wasilla city clerk’s office. And the Wall Street Journal’s law blog notes that the head of McCain’s VP vetting team, A.B. Culvahouse, was still chasing down details about Tim Pawlenty on the day before Palin was announced. (More about Palin’s vetting from ABC and Salon.)

Then there are the disclosures about Palin herself that have emerged in the scrum of reporters, bloggers and opposition researchers all casting about to find the gotcha! moments in Palin’s life and career that McCain’s best and brightest did not bother to inquire about. The best-known is the Troopergate investigation launched by the state after Palin canned Alaska’s public safety commissioner for refusing to fire Palin’s former brother-in-law. The most embarrassing from the point of view of retail politics is her history of absolute devotion to earmarks for federal spending in Alaska; Palin was initially an avid backer of McCain’s ur-earmark, Ted Stevens’ notorious Bridge to Nowhere, and Mike Lillis of WashIndy has found a document in which Palin’s enthusiasm for suckling at the federal teat is recorded in her own handwriting.

More disturbing are the tales of Palin’s devout and extremist religiosity. This morning I wrote to Jeff Sharlet, the author of a brilliant book about the elite branch of the Christian right called The Family (I interviewed him back in June), to ask what he had been able to glean about Palin’s religious pedigree. He wrote back: “The church Palin grew up in hewed to a hard and loud pre-millennialist line. Wasilla Assembly of God isn’t just an end times church; it’s an enthusiastic, ‘bring it on’ end times church. That doesn’t mean Palin would ever do anything to hasten it, at least not with apocalypse in mind. Fundamentalists believe that the end is out of their hands. But their certainty that it’s coming, and probably soon, leads them toward a reckless disregard for the kind of compromises that are the building blocks of democracy. I don’t know as much about her current church, Wasilla Bible, but it sounds pre-millennialist as well, what with its interest in Jews for Jesus.”

Nor are most Americans likely to be happy about Palin’s ties to the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, whose founder, Joe Vogler, makes Jeremiah Wright sound like a pushover: “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government,” he proclaimed in 1991. “And I won’t be buried under their damn flag.”

There have been rumblings as to the possibility that McCain might have to drop Palin from the ticket if the unflattering disclosures keep coming. Two things about that: With the possible but unlikely exception of Troopergate, nothing revealed yet is going to tip the scale of public opinion or media treatment so precipitously as to generate that kind of crisis. And none of the above is going to sunder the GOP’s Jesus First base from the heroine of their favorite new prime-time soap opera. (There is one horseman on the horizon that might accomplish that, however: WashPost’s Trail blog notes that the John Edwards slayers at the National Enquirer are on Palin’s case now with a story alleging that she had an affair with a business colleague of her husband’s.)

The Democrats, and especially the Obama campaign, should be mindful of these equations. There’s no way they’re going to undermine Palin’s appeal to the Christians unless the Enquirer does it for them. And they don’t need to, provided they can inoculate against her among those women and independents who do not believe that Jesus will be back any day, brandishing a sword.

The Democrats would also do well to remember, and stress, that the real issue in the matter of Sarah Palin is the judgment of John McCain. The “process” that delivered her to us was utterly haphazard in the time-honored McCain fashion, and it provides an opening to go after the impulsive and erratic way Johnny Mac has always made decisions. “Goes with his gut” is often just a nicer way of saying “capricious nut,” and here is a great case in point.