The Washington Post has an amazing scoop:

Partisanship Appears to Sway Opinions on Palin

Yes, ladies and gentlemen: you heard here (or, rather, there) first. I wonder if Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta, the authors of this amazing discovery, got a government grant to reach this conclusion? Listen:

Republicans and Democrats have deeply contrasting first impressions of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, suggesting partisanship, not gender [i.e., sex: Palin is a woman, not a part of speech], is paramount in the initial public reviews.

Gosh: who could have worked this out on his own? No wonder we all rely upon such mighty organs as The Washington Post to get the news.

Linda Chavez posted a thoughtful essay over at RealClearPolitics yesterday comparing the way the press has treated Sarah Palin and Barack Obama. “The biggest story to emerge from the Republican National Convention,” she wrote in “The Unexamined Life,” “was the media’s effort to destroy Gov. Sarah Palin.”

So far, that effort has failed, indeed backfired spectacularly. Let me count the ways. Most voters think it is pretty poor form for the media to mount a full-court-press “investigative journalist” “the-public-has-a-right-to-know” strike against Palin’s 17-year-old daughter. Most people think that there are limits to that sort of thing and that there are plenty of cases–this being one–where the children of candidates have the public’s right to No. Then there is the penumbra of vitriolic hatred from the Left that surrounded the media’s feeding frenzy. Mark Steyn published a memorable example over at NRO from a chap in Shelton, Washington:

This abortion prohibitionist hag won’t cut it among women with brains. And BTW she is a good example of reproduction run amok. 5 kids; 1 retard. I wonder if the bitch ever heard of getting spayed.

The answer to that last question, I’d guess, is No, but I reckon that is immaterial. He wasn’t writing for information. He was writing to make a point and communicate an emotion, both of which he did with what you might call hermeneutical transparency. You know where you stand with Anonymous from Shelton, Washington, which is a start.

Chavez documents more of the same and wonders–in approximately the same rhetorical sense as Mark Steyn’s correspondent–why the media, which has lavished such intense personal curiosity on Palin, her husband, and her children, has displayed such reticence about Barck Obama’s past. The fact that Mr. Palin was cited for DUI in 1986 is dragged out and displayed as evidence of grievous moral failing and, by implication, the political unworthiness of his wife. But what about Obama’s drug use? In his memoir, Obama acknowledges that, as a teenager, he indulged in marijuana, alcohol and “maybe a little blow when you could afford it.” But why hasn’t that admission been followed up on by the bloodhounds of the Fourth Estate? What if it came to light that Sarah Palin had used “maybe a little” cocaine some time in her past? Do you think the press would erect a discreet border labeled noli me tangere around the issue as they have done for Obama? Fat chance.

Chavez ends her post with the observation that “it will be a test of the media’s integrity to see if they devote as much time delving into Sen. Obama’s drug use as they did into Bristol Palin’s sex life.” Personally, I believe that the full story of Obama’s relations with folks like Tony Rezko, Bill Ayres, and Jeremiah Wright is likely to be far more troubling than his teenage (but was it only teenage?) use of drugs. But we’re unlikely to get to the bottom of all that before the election unless Stanley Kurtz has some rapid breakthroughs, which he might. Even then, though, one wonders what the media at large would make of the revelations.

Perhaps the most revealing item in Chavez’s post, however, came from Obama himself. The fact of the media’s love affair with “the one we’ve been waiting for” is by now an established given. But why? What is it about Obama that has so captivated the media? Why, for example, do they not take a more robust interest in finding out and reporting on who he is, where he has come from, what he has said and done? A large part of the answer, I suspect, lies in Barack Obama’s possession of what I think of as the Higher Oleaginousness. To my mind, it’s his most conspicuous gift. Recalling in his memoir how he dealt with his mother when she confronted him about drug and alcohol use in high school, he confides a bit about his methods: “I had given her a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry, I wouldn’t do anything stupid. It was usually an effective tactic, another of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.”

It worked on Mrs. Obama. It worked on the mainstream media. How much longer will it work on the voting public? We’ll soon have a chance to find out.

Yesterday, the indispensable Middle East Research Institute published a transcript of a TV interview with Mohammad-Ali Fardanesh, an Iraniam political science professor an “expert” on the United States. Bottom line: he likes Obama and Joe Biden, doesn’t like John McCain or Sarah Palin. What a surprise!.

Americans “Don’t Understand That [Obama’s] Education Would Enable Him to Serve Them Better”

Mohammad-Ali Fardanesh: “The difference between Mr. McCain and Mr. Bush is that McCain steps harder on the gas, but he is driving down the same path, and so there is no difference between them.

[…]

“The problem with Mr. Obama is his education. He is a Harvard graduate. The Americans cannot accept him because they consider him an elitist - someone who thinks he is above others, because he is better educated. They don’t understand that his education would enable him to serve them better.”

Interviewer: “So they will have more money…”

Mohammad-Ali Fardanesh: “This would improve the situation in America in general. The flaw they see in Mr. Obama - which they don’t admit - is that he is highly educated and very eloquent. What does he speak so eloquently for?! Mr. McCain, who considers himself such an expert in international politics, still says ‘Czechoslovakia.’

Interviewer: “He doesn’t know that Czechoslovakia was divided?”

McCain “Doesn’t Know Anything, Poor Thing”

Mohammad-Ali Fardanesh: “He doesn’t know anything, poor thing. He is terrible. Let me tell you, he’s awful. He doesn’t know the difference between Shiites and Sunnis, yet he wants to resolve the problems in Iraq? He doesn’t know whether Iran is Shiite or Sunni, or the difference between the two.”

[…]

Interviewer: “Many experts believe that the crises in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine are the Achilles’ heel of America. Therefore, we should ask whether there is any difference between the Democratic and Republican parties with regard to the issue of Iraq. Is there any difference between them?”

“Biden… Is Respectable and Healthy”

Mohammad-Ali Fardanesh: “Yes. Mr. Obama’s perspective is more clear. Only yesterday, they transferred control of the Al-Anbar province to the Iraqi government, on the first day of Ramadhan. This is something Mr. Obama has been saying. Mr. Obama has said several times: ‘Al-Qaeda operates in 80 countries, but we got ourselves entangled in Iraq. Our presence in Iraq is what led Al-Qaeda to begin operating there.’ That’s why Mr. Obama and his team…

“Mr. Biden is a very respectable man. He has a good reputation, and he is respectable and healthy. He has been in the Senate for 36 years, since he was 29. They are more knowledgeable in foreign affairs. True, Obama has no experience, but McCain not only has no experience, but doesn’t even know where ‘abroad’ is. The poor guy is very absentminded.”

Interviewer: “McCain has declared that if he is elected, American forces will stay in Iraq 100 years. Based on this, can we draw any conclusion about which party is more likely to win?”

Mohammad-Ali Fardanesh: “My problem is that McCain is a war hero, a veteran pilot, whose plane crashed in Vietnam and who spent eight and a half years at war. He is a respectable, humane, honest, and patriotic man, but when it comes to foreign policy and domestic affairs, he has nothing to offer.”

[…]

Interviewer: “Is the fact that [Palin] is a woman likely to appeal to women, and to arouse feminist sentiment in American society?”

Ms. Clinton “Is One of the Strongest Women in American History”; Ms. Palin Has No Experience

Mohammad-Ali Fardanesh: “Definitely. Dr. Kamrava mentioned the question of her experience. I don’t think her husband knows about her experience either. She doesn’t have any experience.”

Interviewer: “She spent two years as governor of Alaska.”

Mohammad-Ali Fardanesh: “Sixteen months. She was the mayor of a town of 10,000 residents. The previous governor of Alaska was a very corrupt man, and anybody running against him would have won. That’s how she won.

“No. My answer is ‘no.’ Just like Obama is a phenomenon, as I said, Ms. Clinton, with her academic record, her determination, and her expertise in various issues, was outstanding and prominent. She is one of the strongest women in American history. Now, Ms. Palin - whose name they don’t even pronounce correctly… Will she manage to attract Clinton’s voters? No.”

The link is here.

In the early 1960s, Bill Buckley famously observed that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Bill, a Yale man, was not singling out the Harvard faculty for special opprobrium. Harvard was merely a synecdoche [a reader suggests that “metonymy” would be more accurate–maybe he is right]. It was the smug, “progressive” liberal consensus that our elite academic institutions inculcated, even back then, that Bill objected to, not Harvard per se. What are the lineaments of that consensus? In God and Man at Yale (1951), Bill said that, for him, “the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world,” and he went on to observe that “the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.” The liberal consensus–the liberal “orthodoxy” as Bill sometimes put it–is on the side of atheism and collectivism. It takes its emotional weather from Rousseau, its economics from Marx, its theology from Nietzsche, its sexual etiquette from some radical disciples of Freud.

Other semantic markers: “Harvard” is suspicious of patriotism, disdainful of small-town values and entertainments, enthusiastic about big government programs and transnational initiatives like the World Court and the EU. It is “homeopathic” at one remove: that is, it harbors a sentimental affection for the Third World, “traditional” medicine, native tribes (”native” anything, really, except “nativism” and “natality”) but only so long as it is filtered through the scrim of Western affluence and “progressive” values. (By the way, I keep putting the word “progressive” in scare quotes because progress suggests a movement forward towards a desirable goal whereas “progressive” in the Harvard sense embraces the rhetoric of progress while advocating policies that stymie it.)

One other point about the Boston phone book-Harvard faculty dichotomy: in preferring the first two thousand names from the Boston phone book, Bill was not thereby repudiating high culture, intellectual seriousness, or moral refinement. It’s only from the eyrie of the “Harvard” Weltanschauung that a largish random sampling of citizens is found culturally deficient. And this leads me to a crucial point about “Harvard” and the “progressive” consensus it represents: it is sophisticated about everything except its own naïveté. It champions cultural relativism–absolutely. It is suspicious when someone shows up peddling “the truth,” especially about moral matters; but it embraces its perspective on the world as inarguable. According to the gospel of “Harvard,” all right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) people agree with the various positions set forth in the catechism of liberalism. To champion the various dogmas set forth in that catechism, says “Harvard,” is simply to exhibit one’s contact with reality. To dissent from them is to exhibit one’s ignorance, bad faith, or malevolence. Nice work if you can get it!

If you can get it? The amazing thing is that there is nothing easier. The liberal consensus has tenure. I mean, it is thoroughly institutionalized, and not only in academia. It has metastasized throughout elite culture. It’s what you are likely to uphold if you were graduated from an Ivy League college, went to law school, or work for The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, etc. It explains the little frisson Chris Matthews felt travelling up his leg as Obama spoke last winter. It also explains the incredulous, spluttering rage that Sarah Palin has provoked in purlieus of liberal self-satisfaction. I call it “Palin Hysteria Syndrome.” Just this morning, for example, I received this email from an acquaintance (I preserve the original orthography and diction: he is a careful writer as a rule, but clearly his emotion got the better of him here):

i read you blog posting on Sarah Palin. Quite a suprise. Never would I have thought you suceptible to trailer trash. More suprising were the comments about Palin’s “executive experience” and being governor of the country’s “largest state.” Once upon a time, those were the sort of sphistries against which you waged glorious battle. The strange bedfellows induced by politics are not integrity and compromise.

“Trailer trash,” eh? Clearly, as Victor Davis Hanson put it yesterday, “Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia” are acting “as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America.” “Cruise missile” is good: it suggests the unexpectedness and deadly accuracy of the blow. But I like to think that Boston phone book–or maybe it’s the Juneau phone book–is finally getting some of its own back. Bill Buckley would be pleased.

In his great book Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, the British theologian, satirist, and mystery writer Ronald Knox notes that, “these days,” America “is the last refuge of the enthusiast,” i.e., one who is convinced of his personal possession by the divine.

I thought about Knox’s book–which focuses primarily on the 17th and 18th centuries and the heresy of Montanism–while watching the crowd cheering Sarah Palin at the Republican National Convention last night. There, surely, was one variety of enthusiasm, understanding the word in the modern, not the theological sense.

I thought the speech a splendid breath of fresh air–an “electrifying mix of intelligence, passion, energy, optimism and plain speaking” as one British paper put it–and I would surely have been cheering wildly along with the rest of the crowd had I been there in St. Paul.

But one of the things that struck me most forcefully about the crowd’s response to Palin’s speech was how the quality of its enthusiasm differed from the enthusiasm that greeted Obama’s Greek-temple oration last week. The crowd went wild for Palin, as it did for Obama. But in her case the enthusiasm was directed more at the performance than the performer. The crowd liked what it heard, and reacted accordingly. Palin came offering a new approach to Washington politics: an approach that featured an effort to make government smaller, to keep it our your life and pocketbook, and that emphasized traditional “small town” virtues like hard work, entrepreneurship, family loyalty, and fiscal responsibility. She also came bearing a refreshing quota of humor: what other candidate for high office would gladly describe herself as a hockey mom and then go on to explain that the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull was that the hockey mom wore lipstick?

By contrast, Obama came offering–himself. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he said in his Super Tuesday speech. I fear that he–and, what’s more, that his acolytes–really believe it. The enthusiasm that greets Obama is not the acknowledgment and approbation of an ambition, as it was in the case of the enthusiasm for Palin’s speech, but rather a coefficient of a personality cult. All those McCain ads portraying Obama as a Messiah-like figure are caricatures. But like any good caricature, they are revelatory precisely because the seize upon and exaggerate an obvious truth. Obama really did say, after all, that his nomination marked the moment when “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

So, it is with enthusiasm as it is with so many other things: there is enthusiasm of the good sort–which describes that natural ebullience we feel in the face of some important good–and there is enthusiasm of the narcissistic sort, which is fervent but blind in its uncritical endorsement of an abstraction: The Leader, The One, be he right or wrong.

I am beginning to worry about the sanity of the Left. Bush Derangement Syndrome was bad enough. Could any human being so thoroughly epitomize the quintessence of evil that the Bush of the Left’s imagination conjured up? But watching BDS suddenly displaced by an epidemic of Palin Hysteria Syndrome has left me positively alarmed. Have these people taken leave of their senses?

Like many observers, I fully expected to Left to attack her. We are, after all, in a partisan political race and criticizing the other side is a large part of what politics is all about. A few days ago, I quoted William Kristol, who observed in The Weekly Standard that

what we will see in the next days and weeks . . . is an effort by all the powers of the old liberalism, both in the Democratic party and the mainstream media, to exorcise [the spectre of Sarah Palin]. They will ridicule her and patronize her. They will distort her words and caricature her biography. They will appeal, sometimes explicitly, to anti-small town and anti-religious prejudice. All of this will be in the cause of trying to prevent the American people from arriving at their own judgment of Sarah Palin.

And so it has transpired, but with a virulence and panic-driven hysteria that I find astonishing. Sarah Palin has acted like a sort of locoweed on the media and Team Obama. She stunned them, not into silence (alas) but into a frenzy of groundless vituperation. Watching it is like watching someone suffer an epileptic fit. Quick, fetch me a tongue depressor!

If (mirabile dictu) I were asked to give one bit of advice to the Obama campaign (a group whose membership includes, ex officio, as it were, the professoriate, the main stream media, and other representatives of the so-called cultural elite) it would be this: give up criticizing Palin for her supposed lack of experience. Just give it a rest. As has been repeatedly pointed out in the last few days, Palin has run a company, a town, and the largest state in the republic. No only does she have more executive experience than Obama, she has more executive experience than Obama, Biden, and John McCain put together. Experience is not the issue. As my friend Jay Nordlinger observed with his customary pithiness, “The reason — the main reason — to oppose Barack Obama is not that he lacks experience but that he is a leftist. The reason [for those on the Left] to oppose Palin is that she is a conservative.”

What worries me is how the Left is going cope come the election. Their hysteria about Sarah Palin simultaneously shows that they know deep down that something has gone terribly wrong with Obama’s Children’s “Yes-we-can” Crusade and that they are unable to acknowledge the damage. Their hysteria signals both their panic and their blindness. I predict that on the morning of that fateful day in early November they are going to be like Pauline Kael the day after the 1972 election when Richard Nixon won 49 states: “How could that be?” a bewildered Kael asked. “I don’t know a single person who voted for Nixon.” The disillusionment this time will be even more bitter. I suggest that caring Republicans consider establishing emergency telephone hotlines and outpatient trauma centers in demographically susceptible areas–New York City, for example, Ann Arbor, all of the states of Massachusetts and Vermont, etc.–in order to cope with the shock that their burst bubble will undoubtedly cause.

At bottom, this election is not about “change” or “experience” but about culture, which is to say it is about what we value as individuals and as citizens. It is about some very basic questions: what matters most in a society? How should we live our lives? What place does love of country, of family, of freedom have in the economy of our hopes and ambitions? The crises of the last several years–the threat of Islamic terrorism, economic instability, a newly rampant Russia and Iran–have pushed such questions out of the limelight. But Sarah Palin–the pro-life, gun toting, seriously religious hockey mom and aggressive political reformer–has suddenly brought them back into vogue. As Thomas Lifson notes, “Liberals have long lamented the existence of two nations in America. They are right to do so today, but in a way they never meant. It is not the divide between rich and poor which soon will be causing serious pain on the left. Sarah Palin’s pending nomination for Vice President is exposing the depth of the cultural divide between Middle America and the leftists who have taken over the education, media, and cultural establishment of our country.”

With the victory of John McCain and Sarah Palin, the hegemony of the left-wing establishment in those cultural redoubts will be fundamentally challenged. The Left senses, even if it has yet to face up to, this reality. That is why they are so hysterical. And it is one reason they will wake up repeating the Pauline Kael lament in November.

From the mailbag: John Frary (who by the way is running for Congress in Maine) provided this thoughtful comment (# 138) on my post of a couple days ago about Sarah Palin:

Frederick the Great on the value of experience: “A mule who has carried a pack for ten campaigns under Prince Eugene will be no better tactician for it, and… many men grow old in an otherwise respectable profession without making any greater progress than this mule.”

The experience argument, whether applied to Obama or Palin, is not all that conclusive.
Both have more experience than Lincoln had when he was first elected.

For me the most pertinent comparison is this: Palin clearly rose to prominence as an opponent of a corrupt Repbulican establishement in Alaska, while Obama nestled comfortably in the Chicago political sewer without ever causing a problem.

Are you favor of an informed electorate? Of course you are. You want people to know about the candidates and the issues so that when they vote they know what they are voting for. I hope some public spirited Democrat will come along and provide a precis of the McCain-Palin ticket, pointing out, for example, that it advocates drilling for oil in Alaska and elsewhere, that it is pro-life, that it supports The Surge in Iraq, that it condemns Russian aggression in Georgia, etc., etc. There is a long list of items that might be compiled to give us a good sense of what McCain-Palin stands: what it thinks of America’s place on the world stage and what it thinks of you, the ordinary voter.

A different list could be made about Obama-Biden ticket. Compiling a really thorough inventory would be a big task, but I am happy to share a preliminary effort sent to me by a friend. It leaves a lot out of account, but it does provide a first lesson for those who may have heard about Obama but are not quite sure who he is, where he comes from, or what he stands. I hope that this and similar documents will enjoy wide circulation as the campaign unfolds and the public endeavors to get a better sense of who the candidates are and what they espouse

(Detach Here)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

STATEMENT OF INTENT TO VOTE FOR SENATOR BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA

I, ______________________, a Citizen of The United States of America and a legally registered voter (or, with the help of ACORN able to pose as one), from the State of _______________________, hereby declare that I will cast my vote for president, in the upcoming November 2008 election, for Senator Barack Hussein Obama. As such, I make the following declarations:

1). I fully understand that Senator Obama served on two boards with, and launched his political career at the home of, William Ayers, a former leader of the terrorist organization called The Weather Underground. I further acknowledge that William Ayers bombed the Pentagon in Washington D.C, long before Al Queda attacked it with an airplane full of innocent people, that Obama’s associate and friend, William Ayers was involved in numerous other violent attacks against my country, for which he has never apologized or expressed regret. I also acknowledge that William Ayers told Rolling Stone Magazine years after those attacked that, far from regret, he felt “[he] didn’t do enough.”

I am comfortable with the fact that Senator Obama keeps company with this unrepentant terrorist. ______ (initial here)

2). I acknowledge that Senator Obama voted against a Bill that would have made it illegal to kill a baby which survived a botched abortion.

I am in full support of Senator Obama;s tacit endorsement of infanticide. ______ (initial here)

3). I am aware that, despite earning $4.2 Million dollars in 2007, Senator Obama lives in a $3 Million home partially paid for by convicted Felon, Tony Rezko. I support Senator Obama’s decision to vote to give the same Tony Rezko $14 Million in taxpayer moeny to build slum-like housing developments which later went bankrupt.

4). I am of the firm, established position that Senator Obama is incapable of doing anything which could dissuade me from voting for him. ______ (initial here)

I do so affirm:

__________________________________

Full Name

__________________________________

Date

Don’t be fooled: the left is terrified of Sarah Palin. Just savor, if your stomach is strong enough, Gail Collins’s sophomoric effort yesterday in The New York Times, “McCain’s Baked Alaska” (Get it?). “The idea,” sniffs Collins, “that women are going to race off to vote for any candidate with the same internal plumbing is both offensive and historically wrong.” I wish it were so, Gail. But the distaff side was queuing up in droves to vote for HRC and not, as you said, “as the best-prepared candidate in the Democratic pack,” but precisely because of the plumbing.

And folks are electrified by Sarah Palin not because she’s female, but because she’s a breath of fresh air: a tough, attractive, conservative, pro-family, patriotic candidate who is as articulate as she is unbeholden to the beltway, business-as-usual pork-barrel machinery. She represents exactly the sort of change that Obama invoked but never managed to articulate.

William Kristol, in a splendid piece in The Weekly Standard, gets it just right. Palin is a frightening “spectre” to the Left precisely because she is everything they despise: “a working woman who’s a proud wife and mother; a traditionalist in important matters who’s broken through all kinds of barriers; a reformer who’s a Republican; a challenger of a corrupt good-old-boy establishment who’s a conservative; a successful woman whose life is unapologetically grounded in religious belief; a lady who’s a leader.”

And Kristol is right, too, in what we can expect in the coming weeks:

So what we will see in the next days and weeks–what we have already seen in the hours after her nomination–is an effort by all the powers of the old liberalism, both in the Democratic party and the mainstream media, to exorcise this spectre. They will ridicule her and patronize her. They will distort her words and caricature her biography. They will appeal, sometimes explicitly, to anti-small town and anti-religious prejudice. All of this will be in the cause of trying to prevent the American people from arriving at their own judgment of Sarah Palin.

I spoke to a savvy, politically connected friend yesterday who told me that MSM journalists were already packing into planes, trains, and automobiles to hie themselves thither to Alaska in order to prospect for the gold of D.O.P.–dirt on Palin. Well, good luck to ‘em. What the Clintons called (and, even more, what they practiced) “the politics of personal destruction” is never pretty. But I suspect that, like most gold prospectors of yore, they will come up empty handed in this case. The only thing I’ve heard is the story about her getting her unstable brother-in-law fired: not much there for the fourth estate, especially since Palin has been so cooperative with the inquiry that they haven’t even had to issue a subpoena.

In the larger sense, of course, it is a good thing for the public to learn more about Sarah Palin, her origins, her passions, her associates, her behavior as a young politician. The same scrutiny should be directed towards Obama, McCain, and Biden. I suspect most people will like what they discover about Sarah Palin. Will they like what they discover about Obama? How do you spell “Tony Rezko”? What do you know about Jeremiah Wright? Would you want your daughter–or your President–consorting with Bill “the bomber” Ayers?

Noting that for the next weeks Palin will “be swimming in political waters infested with sharks,” Kristol cautions the McCain team to react swiftly but proportionately to the inevitable attacks that will launched against Palin in an effort to preempt the public’s image of her. That’s good advice, but I suspect that Palin will be an even more formidable candidate than the Democrats fear. Kristol quotes a liberal commentator who gleefully adapted a mot from Secretary of State Jim Baker: “putting Sarah Palin into a debate with Joe Biden,” he said “is going to be like throwing Howdy Doody into a knife fight!” Maybe so. But it’s not at all clear who will be Mr. Doody, and who will be wielding the knife. In earlier days, when he was a young, arrogant politician, Joe Biden famously bragged to some questioners about his high IQ (probably higher than yours, he told them). I confess that I rather admired his brass in that exchange. And, probably, the young, arrogant Biden was correct in his assessment. But what of the old, arrogant Biden? What will he be like pitted against a smart, articulate debater who is, at least, his intellectual equal? Anyone care to make a bet?

Many observers have commented on the high style of Obama’s campaign. The logo, the kiddie Latin slogan (”amo, amas, amat, vero possumus”), the be-columned stage set, etc., etc. It’s all very well, or at least very thoroughly orchestrated, but the more I think about it the less appropriate the word “style” seems. Really, it is a matter of political theater.

Not, I hasten to add, that the Obama campaign does not have a style. It does, as of course does the McCain campaign. How do they differ? Well, the day of Obama’s big speech, McCain himself takes to the airwaves to congratulate the Senator. Tomorrow, he said, we’ll get back to campaigning, but today he wanted to take a moment to praise his opponent for a job well done.

Yesterday, when McCain annoucned that his running mate would be Sarah Palin, the Obama campaign instantly issued a response:

“Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

Bad move, boys! First, it was ungentlemanly–not because Palin is a woman, but because etiquette demands a civil expression of congratulations on such occasions. Second, raising the question of experience naturally leads to the question: “OK, the pick for VP doesn’t have much executive experience, but how much experience does the Democratic nominee for president have?” There is the further issue that the less Obama says about foreign policy the better. Just uttering the phrase might sow a seed of doubt in people’s minds: they might put down yesterday’s paper, the one describing what the Russians are doing to Georgia, the one with the pictures of US and Russian warships in the Black Sea, and they might say, “Gosh, how would Obama deal with a fellow like Vladimir Putin?” In an earlier time, President Bush said that he looked into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul; more recently, John McCain looked at the same spot and said he saw three things: “K, G, and B.” In the case of Georgia, Obama’s first response was to say there was fault on both sides and then to suggest that we refer the conflict to the U.N. McCain forthrightly condemned the aggression and supported the declaration issued by the Presidents of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, that “aggression against a small country in Europe will not be passed over in silence or with meaningless statements equating the victims with the victimizers.”

But back to the question of style. Sarah Palin, in her brief speech accepting McCain’s offer to join the ticket, paid homage to Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro, two Democrats, for leading the way past glass ceiling for women in American politics. A handsome gesture, no? Within hours of her speech, team Obama must have realized that their sour-grapes response wasn’t playing well, so Senator Biden issued a congratulatory statement and Obama himself, asked about the discrepancy between the initial statement issued by his campaign and Biden’s more temperate response, hemmed and hawed about campaigns being, um, on a hair trigger, uh, and, um, yes he, um, agreed, uh, with um, Senator Biden’s sentiments.

Gee, thanks! (Mr. Eloquence was without his teleprompter, you see.)

There is a big difference in style between the McCain and Obama campaigns. If you go to Obama’s web site, you’ll find lots of complaints about the “smears,” “outrageous lies,” etc. supposedly perpetrated by the other side. An example? The most recent is the hysterical attack on the journalist Stanley Kurtz who has been looking into Obama’s early political career, not least his association with the terrorist Bill Ayers. In fact, Stanley Kurtz is simply doing what political journalists do: filling out the historical record and illuminating the origins, associates, and early career of a man who has put himself forward to be President of the United States.

On the McCain web site, by contrast, there is no whining about how unfair the other side treats him. Obama asks us to “believe in” him; McCain asks us to consider what is best for the country. For him, action, not belief is the issue. (A lot could be written, in fact, about Obama’s quasi-religious rhetoric: it’s one thing to ask people to believe that one candidate has the better vision for the country; it is quite another for a candidate to ask us to believe in him and his vision.)

Watching Sarah Palin’s speech yesterday I found myself almost feeling sorry for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Almost. Here they are campaigning on “change” and optimism and the common man and transcending politics as usual. And their campaign is the same old business and usual, Chicago-style swamp politics. If it were an athletic contest, McCain/Palin would probably have to play with some sort of handicap. But it wouldn’t matter. Even with a steep handcap they would eat Obama and Biden for lunch. The carnage will not be pretty. But perhaps it will finally get the message through to the DNC: you don’t win elections by vapid talk about change. You win them by sound policies that offer change where change is needed and continuity where change would be irresponsible.