Amidst the mountain of praise heaped on Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention yesterday, one assessment stuck out for me. According to NBC's political director Chuck Todd, in Palin, "conservatives have found their Obama".
What does this mean? Like Obama, Palin is young and in her 40s, a striking contrast to the wizened John McCain. Like Obama, Palin is a "Washington outsider", and even more so than the Democrat candidate. Alaska is about as far away as an American can grow up from Washington, where Obama is currently a senator. And like Obama, Palin brings a "breath of fresh air" to positions historically the reserve of white males.
But do these similarities mean that Palin will have the same impact on US politics as Obama has had? Decidedly not. As her speech in the Twin Cities has shown, Palin's role in this election is to exacerbate traditional political divisions and to debase the tenor of politics in the country.
I was fairly charitable to Palin after her selection as McCain's running-mate; it seemed too easy to resort to the "knee-jerk" liberal attacks on her inexperience and provincialism. Yet it's clear after her performance yesterday that Palin is not a choice for the future, but a reminder of the unaccommodating, snide Republican politics that laid the foundations of the eight years of the Bush administration. Her snark-filled speech made little attempt to confront, in any kind of detail, serious issues or to elevate the tone of political discussion.
Within that safe conservative bubble, she chose to wallow in the muck of cheap attacks and deliberate misinformation. Hackneyed binaries paraded about the auditorium: "small town America" against the elitist doyens of the coasts; bluntness over subtle thinking; Republican small government against the Democrat nanny state (when government has in many respects only gotten bigger under the Republicans). This was a populist speech of the crudest kind, demanding nothing of its listeners but the re-affirmation of what they already believe.
If this is how Republicans plan to "shake up Washington", than it is a sad indictment of the state of the conservative party. Obama may be a shrewd and meticulous politician, but he at least can never be accused of empty cynicism.