For the first time ever in this election cycle the GOP actually has momentum.
We were watching this election slowly trickle down our pantlegs, until last night.
But now McCain and Palin have gone off-script.
The planned ritual execution of the Old White Guys before the coronation of His Holiness Barack I is now officially not-going-as-scheduled.
McCain threw a barracuda into the swimming pool. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t.
But it has made life interesting, for now.
(And it has made Obama’s defensive eat-up-the-clock approach look ill-advised. It has also made his, or his wife’s, rejection of Hillary look like the weak decision it was. Real leaders have the stones to surround themselves with the strongest people in their own party. JKF took LBJ, Reagan took Bush I, Clinton took Gore. That is how the pols with balls do it.)
The MSM and the Donks are stunned.
But they won’t stay stunned.
Their initial volley of vicious slime attacks and jeering, arrogant condescension have failed. The Donks and their MSM allies, the ones who are assigned to do the dirty work, will now come back like cornered rats, like animals. It is going to get way, way worse.
Expect a massive and vicious counter-attack, possibly based on some purported “new revelations” of corruption, against Palin to begin today or tomorrow. No doubt Mr. Axelrod and his team, Obama’s brain, are working hard right now on the counter-attack.
They have to destroy her now.
Gov. Palin and her family are going to have an ugly two months.
UPDATE 1: “I’m really looking forward to the VP debates. And – for the first time – the election itself, although there’s a lot of water between here and there, and something tells me that the long knives are being sharpened.” Neptunus Lex (The Other Lex!) gets it.
UPDATE 2: I laughed out loud at the spirit of this, and its apparent accuracy:
There’s also more to the pit bull thing: Why do they bite so hard? Because that is what they love to do most in life. And it’s not funny, unless the person get chewed up richly deserves it. She even found a funny, extemporaneous (apparently) way to say explicitly that she was, in fact, a pit bull, though one with lipstick. Translation: I wear lipstick and I am your worst nightmare.
This lady was not fighting for her life. She was having the time of her life. She’s a stone fighter, not the kind of victim the bullies want. I begin to get the barracuda moniker. A natural born killer. I think I’m in love.
UPDATE 3: Here’s the photo of Gov. Palin with the moose she bagged. I’d heard about it, but I had not seen it before. Looks like good eatin’.
You are right Lex, it is going to be horrible for that family. I don’t have the stones to put myself or my family through what will undoubtedly be a very nasty sixty days.
It makes me wonder how many of the best and brightest we don’t get in politics just because they don’t want to put themselves and their families through all of the pain.
“The planned ritual execution of the Old White Guys before the coronation of His Holiness Barack I is now officially not-going-as-scheduled.”
Bingo! The strategy all along was running against two, elderly, white guys – preferably with elderly white guy#2 being a colorless, humorless, out of touch, tight-ass. I wonder how much $$ the Obama campaign sank in scaling up to a national level the new computer modeling demographic voter pattern analysis pioneered by Bill Foster for his congressional district, based on that premise.
If they did, a lot of money and time just was flushed down the crapper. What’s the fallback ? Ummm, go negative and hope the GOP doesn’t hit back effectively.
McCain needs to keep Obama off balance by throwing in more variables then they can deal with before they can adapt to Palin. Right now they are just blindly emailing attack “fact check” alerts that themselves play very loose with facts. They are ripe for independent counterattack too.
“The strategy all along …”
McCain/Palin are WAY inside Barack’s OODA loop right now.
Even Axelrod’s public response was so lame — Yes, Barack DID TOO sponsor some legislation! — he shouldn’t have said anything. This shows they are simply flailing.
A perpetual drumbeat of mob-sourced fact-checking and criticism of Barack by the Base can be the guerilla screen while the official McCain/Palin campaign can be the conventional Leviathan landing the heavy blows.
The MSM is so ideologically fixated and so detached from ordinarly American reality that I expect the very ugliness and brutality of their next wave of attacks, driven by fear, to boomerang, outrage swing voters in relevant states, and work to the benefit of McCain’s team.
American democracy is the ultimate major league sport, and the only one with consequences.
God bless America.
Awesome moose! They are quite tasty, I can tell you from experience.
Lex writes: “Real leaders have the stones to surround themselves with the strongest people in their own party. JKF took LBJ, Reagan took Bush I, Clinton took Gore. That is how the pols with balls do it.”
And Lincoln took Seward and Chase — and later Stanton, who wasn’t even in his party, but was the right man for Secretary of War.
Eric, right on.
And George Washington had all the heavy hitters in the room.
Don’t forget W with Cheney and Rumsfeld.
There have been some interesting comparisons between Obama and Palin over the last 24 hour news cycle. The AP did a break down year by year with both…but the most interesting comparison was the Michelle vs. Sarah that looked at it in through the prism of the year both were born. I can’t recall where that 1964 comparison was done but I found it on obamatracker.com
It would be a very good idea to draw from GOP historical memory and revive T.R.’s Bull Moose icon and associate it with McCain and Palin – suddenly they are the insurgent force now.
Looks more like a caribou than a moose. Moose tend not to have pointed antlers.
Robert, you may well be right.
Somebody find us that damn moose picture, please.
It still looks like it would be good to eat.
Yeah, that’s no moose. Moose are huge. But never mind. She has the right attitude.
“It makes me wonder how many of the best and brightest we don’t get in politics just because they don’t want to put themselves and their families through all of the pain.”
If Palin succeeds, I guarantee a lot more will step up. Strong families know what to do with pain; its futility they’re not much interested in.
FoxFan – That 1964 comparison was Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post. She worked way to hard to make a point that was not really valid. (Follow the link here.)
I’m just a Brooklyn boy who’s closest encounter with wildlife was at the Bronx Zoo, but dat ain’t no moose. Caribou maybe?
No matter, she’s got my vote!