Love her or hate her, if you haven’t heard her speak live to a crowd then you can’t come close to understanding Sara Palin’s crowd appeal. She’s not just better than McCane and Biden but she electrifies an audience even more than Obama does and she generates enormous enthusiasm at her events.

Kathy Seals, who attended the Richmond event, said she “admired Ms. Palin for unabashedly speaking the truth” and Ray Gilson of Corapeake, N.C., who attended the Virginia Beach rally said, “She’s intelligent, she’s adorable and she has the audacity to speak her mind and I’ve never loved a politician like I love her. I want her to be president someday!”.

A large part of Palin’s appeal is that she loves America and when she says she loves the national anthem, the Navy bases and small towns and the smell of cut grass, she speaks from the heart and you can feel it.

And taking a dig at Obama she’ll often add, “and I don’t care what anyone else says about small-town U.S.A. You guys, you just get it”. After she told more than 10,000 people at the ‘Richmond International Raceway’ that, “John McCain is always, always proud to be an American’ she went on to lead the crowd in a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.”!

Palin’s speeches don’t suggest that the way to avoid future mistakes is by looking at previous ones and she glosses over uncomfortable details and instead of talking about Bush and the White House she says things such as, “America, doggone it, unfortunately we’re deep in debt and Barack Obama would put us even deeper in debt. We’ve got to reverse this. America, we cannot afford another big spender in the White House”.

Whether or not Palin’s partisan zeal will turn off some independent voters in closely contested states like New Hampshire and Pennsylvania is debatable but the Democratic polling in both states shows Ms. Palin with high negative ratings amongst independents.

Although she doesn’t go into a lot of policy detail she can raise excitement in an instant. When asked in Virginia Beach if McCain’s really has the ability to lead the country out of its present financial crisis she replied, “He’s got the guts to confront the $10 trillion debt that the federal government has run up and we will balance the budget by the end of our term”.

Regardless of whether she goes into specifics or not the audiences affection for her is palpable and when she talks of her own personal trials and tribulations the audience grows quiet. She describes how frightened she was when she first learned that their baby would have special needs and talks with emotion of how they finally decided to have the child after talking, praying and reflecting.

“There are the world’s standards of perfection, and that’s what you see in some magazines, and then there are God’s standards and God’s standards are the final measure and every child is beautiful before God”.

The personal narrative is a natural segue into a comment on Obama’s view of abortion, “It’s not negative and not mean-spirited in a campaign to check out our opponent’s record” and adds with a smile, “I’ll let you judge for yourself”.

When Bush was on the campaign trail he was a plain-spoken and energetic campaigner who solidified his appeal in the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns by using a ‘with-us-or-against-us message’ and Palin’s message is similarly directed at “good, hard-working, patriotic Americans”.

(more…)