Palin appeal is international

Janice Turner:

It was, for us legion of Sarah Palin obsessives, a disappointing debate all said. No moose-in-night-sights Couric interview dead air, no dizzying glimpses down the bottomless well of her unknowledge, no dinosaurs, no pipelines mandated by God. No foxy peep-toe heels, jewel-bright jackets or Christmas-cracker ear-wear - funereal garb now a universal political signifier of earnestness in hard times - and no definitive answer either to the most pressing issue of the campaign so far: did Sarah Palin, as the Huffington Post claims, have her lip-liner permanently tattooed on?

Instead, we had Mrs Palin in Pygmalion, marshalling her notes, getting those harsh, flat snowline vowels around foreign leaders' names learnt by rote: enunciating Hamid Karzai and Kim Jong Il not once but twice, because now - listen up, you snippy media folks! - she darn well can. Professor Henry Higgins-Kissinger has schooled her well, as have the strategist crammers who locked her away in John McCain's Arizona ranch, not letting her take the bunch of marbles from her mouth until she could say Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But then Mrs Palin didn't need to be much more than a Pygmalion politician: to show she is a fast study, able to muster an appearance of competence and fluency, to leave the Saturday Night Live team scratching their heads for easy one-liners.

Eliza Doolittle didn't win hearts for her newly acquired grasp of polite manners, but because of the hot, unschooled heart that oftentimes beat through her shell of shallow learning. And the joy of Mrs Palin, what endears her to Middle America and fascinates every British woman I know, is her quality that cannot be bottled and sold: authenticity.

It shines out, even through her shopping-channel presentation, the Day-Glo patriotism of her XXL Old Glory lapel pin, her talent for talking while perpetually smiling (which, ask Gordon Brown, is a tough trick to pull off without looking deranged), the cheeseball winks, the local DJ shout-outs to kids at her brother's elementary school, the exaggerated nose wrinkles when uttering something as disgusting as “single-sex relationships” or “redistribution of wealth”. She is Nicole Kidman as the driven weather girl in To Die For, Reese Witherspoon, the ruthless high-school candidate in Election. A candy-coated ball of granite.

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After that debate, those who loathe Mrs Palin will still loathe her; those who cleave to her will find no new reason to be repelled. It is just shtick, she's sticking to the rigid train tracks of her notes, you tell yourself when she says how Saturday soccer parents fret at the touchline over their investments. But then the debate ends, her great messy family spreads out on stage, and Mrs Palin tenderly passes her always-placid Down's baby to her little girl. The sound is off, the scripted babble is over. It is a silent gesture, something compellingly real in a cooked-up world.

The authenticity showed when she nailed Biden for his vote for the war he opposed and her comment describing Obama's Iraq policy as the white flag of surrender. It showed when she nailed Obama for saying our troops in Afghanistan were bombing civilians. Democrat phonies keep trying to make her out as a phony, but it is not working.

I find it interesting that she has so charmed the Brits without really trying. That only happens because she is authentic.