Palin drawing huge enthusiastic crowds

NY Times:

Florida is as far as Gov. Sarah Palin could be from Alaska, and still remain in the United States, but she knew home when she saw it.

Standing before a sea of red T-shirts and homemade signs reading “No Communists!” and “Palin’s Pitbulls,” Ms. Palin on Tuesday nestled in to her Republican base.

“Our opponent voted to cut off funding for our troops,” Ms. Palin said, as she was interrupted by a deep-throated chorus of boos. “He did this even after saying that he wouldn’t do such a thing. And he said, too, that our troops in Afghanistan are just, quote, ‘air-raiding villages and killing civilians.’ I hope Americans know that is not what our brave men and women are doing in Afghanistan.”

“Treason!” one man in the crowd shouted angrily.

On a two-day, five-rally campaign swing through Florida, Ms. Palin was met by an enthusiastic response from audiences who devoured every word of her anti-Democratic pitch.

From Jacksonville in the northeast to Pensacola in the Panhandle, the fiery crowds gathered to jeer at any hint of liberalism, boo loudly at the mere mention of Senator Barack Obama’s name and heckle the traveling press corps (at a rally in Clearwater, one man hurled a racial epithet at a television cameraman).

If there were undecideds, independents or swing voters among them, they were awfully hard to spot.

Florida is still a too-close-to-call battleground state, with most recent polls showing Mr. Obama ahead, but not by much. That Ms. Palin campaigned there in Republican strongholds like Pensacola suggests an effort to increase turnout among the party’s base.

Ms. Palin, and the speakers who opened for her, gave the crowds what they came for.

A conservative radio host who spoke Monday told the crowd that Mr. Obama “hangs around with terrorists.” Another speaker at the same rally wondered out loud, to wild applause, “How can anyone aspire to be our commander in chief when he would not last two hours in one of our military academies?”

When it was Ms. Palin’s turn, she struck at some of the same themes, portraying Mr. Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal with a “left-wing agenda that’s packaged and prettied up to look good like mainstream policies.”

“Higher taxes and bigger government and activist courts and retreat in war — that’s not the right track for America,” she said in Pensacola. “That’s another dead end.”

The crowd cheered.

She repeatedly attacked Mr. Obama for his association with Bill Ayers, the leader of a 1960s radical group, the Weather Underground.

“I’m afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country,” she said at a rally in Clearwater.

In Pensacola, she ridiculed him for his campaign’s statement that he did not know Mr. Ayers’s full background when they were first acquainted. “He didn’t know that he had launched his career in the living room of a domestic terrorist?” she said.

“Get him, Sarah!” one woman yelled.

...

You get the impression from reading the full story that the reporter is examining a strange insect rather than a political phenomenon. She is obviously surprised that some people in the crowd support President Bush and uses that to marginalize the impact of the enthusiasm that Palin is creating.

What has the crowd excited is that someone is speaking up for their values and pushing back at the evils of liberalism and its proponents int he Democrat party. One of Bush's major failings is his failure to push back and criticize Democrats opponents. McCain is not too good at that either, but Palin is excellent.