This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 19 Nov 2008, by Clay Burell.
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19 Nov 08
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Over at slate.com, conservatives were more critical.
Tucker Carlson apparently wasn't impressed with Palin's - um - verbal skills. On Slate's forum, The Conservative Crackup, he wrote:
After the (Republican) party has settled on what it believes, it ought to go shopping for a leader. I recommend someone who speaks fluent English. This matters, it turns out, and not just for aesthetic reasons. In a democracy, eloquence is a basic condition of leadership. A president has a moral as well as a political obligation to explain his program. His constitutional powers are limited to just a few (war, the veto). His real authority comes from persuasion.
It helps if you can talk.
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Kathleen Parker didn't succumb to Palin's "folksy charm":
Palin whipped up crowds, winking her way through attacks against Obama that telegraphed, "He's not one of us." We saw the cackling white man toting an Obama monkey to a rally and listened slack-jawed as country singer Gretchen Wilson belted out "Redneck Woman" while Palin clapped and lip-synched her favorite song.
They saw in Palin a kindred spirit who was fearless in defending bedrock values of family, country, and, yes, belief in a higher authority. What they failed to acknowledge was that Obama and family-churchgoing, well-educated exemplars of community service-were the embodiment of those same values, a Rockwellian portrait rendered with the brushstrokes of our professed core beliefs that all men are created equal-and that through hard work, anyone can become anything in the United States of America.
The Republican base is fast becoming a racial and cultural minority. . . .. Her supporters were willingly blind to her weaknesses. . .
What a great many others saw was someone out of her depth, whose lack of knowledge-and apparent lack of intellectual curiosity was a bonding agent with the Republican base.
Palin covered her inadequacies with folksy charm and by drumming up a class war, turning her audiences not just against elites but against the party's own educated members.
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