Palin's Speech

My brief impressions were that while it was delivered well and will certainly help her favorability ratings what it primarily tried to do was to shift the focus off of the issues. As Chuck Todd pointed out, though Republicans loved it there was very little of note about healthcare or the economy and this should be ripe grounds for attack by the Democrats. I think that speech was implicitly invoking a nostalgia for the stereotypical idea of what an authentic American is (or even more so the "authentic" American family). I think that this is the angle the McCain campaign is also trying to go with the "Country First" slogan (even though Palin has strong ties to the Alaska First groups as well!). Either way, we'll see in the polling over the next week how it plays out.

Having said that, things still remain as they were before. She's a right-wing radical. And McCain is offering four more years of the same failed policies.