Palin the most dynamic speaker in the campaign

NY Times:

Here is the thing about Gov. Sarah Palin: She loves America. Really loves it. She loves the smell of cut grass and hay, as she told Ohio voters Sunday. She loves Navy bases, she said in Virginia Beach on Monday morning. She loves America’s “most beautiful national anthem,” she told a crowd here a few hours later.

Apparently there are people who do not feel the same way about America as Ms. Palin does, she said at campaign rallies over the last two days. Those people just do not get it.

“Man, I love small-town U.S.A.,” Ms. Palin told several thousand people on a field in Ohio, “and I don’t care what anyone else says about small-town U.S.A. You guys, you just get it.”

Ms. Palin did not identify who “anyone else” was. But listening to her campaign speeches three weeks before the presidential election, an informed voter would not need two chances to guess between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain. (The posters reading “Barack Bin Lyin” at the McCain-Palin rally in Virginia Beach might be a hint, too.)

“John McCain is always, always proud to be an American,” Ms. Palin told more than 10,000 people at the Richmond International Raceway. “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” she continued, leading many of them in chant.

As the Republican vice-presidential nominee for six and a half weeks now, Ms. Palin has emerged as the most electrifying speechmaker among the four politicians on the major party tickets. She generates enormous fervor at her events; people sometimes do not stop clapping or shouting words of praise until Ms. Palin pauses.

But Ms. Palin’s partisan zeal could repel some independent voters in closely contested states like New Hampshire and Pennsylvania; Democratic polling in both states shows Ms. Palin with high negative ratings among independents. Palin advisers say many of these voters do not know enough about her; Ms. Palin is campaigning in Pennsylvania on Tuesday and New Hampshire on Wednesday.

...

“America, doggone it, unfortunately we’re deep in debt, and Barack Obama would put us even deeper in debt,” she added a few minutes later. “We’ve got to reverse this. America, we cannot afford another big spender in the White House.”

...

“She’s intelligent, she’s adorable and she has the audacity to speak her mind,” said Ray Gilson of Corapeake, N.C., who attended the Virginia Beach rally. “I’ve never loved a politician like I love her. I want her to be president someday.”

Kathy Seals, a Republican voter who attended the Richmond event, said she admired Ms. Palin for “unabashedly speaking the truth, especially about life and the choices she made about her baby, Trig, and with her daughter.” Ms. Palin’s infant son, who has Down syndrome, is a frequent presence in his mother’s left arm as she shakes hands with supporters and moves from event to event.

Her references to her son are the most personal part of her speech, as she describes being scared when she first learned that the baby would have special needs. She and her husband, Todd, talked, prayed, reflected and ultimately decided to have the child.

“There are the world’s standards of perfection, and that’s what you see in some magazines, and then there are God’s standards,” she said at the Ohio rally Sunday night and repeated in Virginia on Monday. “God’s standards are the final measure. Every child is beautiful before God, and dear to them for their own sake.”

Even on this subject, though, Ms. Palin saw little common ground with “our opponents.”

“It’s not negative and not mean-spirited in a campaign to check out our opponent’s record,” Ms. Palin said, citing Mr. Obama’s positions on late-term abortions. Smiling, she added, “I’ll let you judge for yourself.”

I left out most of the snide asides that come with a NY Times story about a conservative. I did leave in the one about repelling independent voters because it demonstrates the catch 22 of liberal reporters. They assume that candidates should ignore their base of support or even alienate them in order to get the squishy voters who don't have a passion for the issues that animate Republican voters.

What does slip through is how good Palin is at framing the issues in a way that appeals to her voters and is hard to attack. She is going to be a formidable candidate in the coming years.