GOP Stages “Beauty and the Beast”

A Republican star was born tonight, but Sarah Palin’s success as a pit bull with lipstick, to use her own definition of a soccer mom, was greatly enhanced by following the smug, sarcastic Rudy Giuliani, who redefined the word “demagogue” with his ugly, leering attacks on Barack Obama. (If you have a strong stomach, read it here, but I won’t quote from it.)

America’s Mayor, who led the polls for months before being unmasked as a self-seeking, corner-cutting profiteer after 9/11, set the stage for making the Republican VP candidate look poised and plausible in her well-crafted, well-delivered speech that did little more than exalt McCain and demean Obama with the clichés of a campaign desperately trying to avoid discussion of eight years of Bush disaster.

Introducing her parents, Palin went back more than half a century to a Democratic role model:

“Long ago, a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency. And a writer observed, ‘We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,’ and I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.”

Unanswered in Palin’s speech were the multiple questions about her brief political history and the substance of her beliefs but, for one evening at least, she surpassed all expectations–thanks at least in part to being seen in contrast to the unspeakable Rudy Giuliani.

Cross-posted from my blog.