Was Palin Really That Good?

Sarah Palin had her night in the spotlight at the RNC. Predictably, the last thing I heard before changing the channel was from a cable network commentator gushing, "A star was born tonight"! Oh really? I found Gov. Palin's speech to be nothing less than a passionless, scripted, superficial string of half truths, outright falsehoods, and rehashed attacks on Barack Obama.

She spent nearly the first ten minutes of it introducing her family, which may have been to lower her unfamiliarity quotient. Then then droned on and on, pausing for applause that seemed clearly manufactured. She mentioned foreign countries without once mentioning world leaders. If she spent the previous 48 hours rehearsing a speech she didn't write, it showed.

As for her attacks on Obama, those too rang hollow. She said he wants to expand government, hinted he'd rather be president than achieve "victory" in Iraq (she, like her GOP colleagues, never say what victory is), and attacked his vision as a "cloud of rhetoric". Yeah, but at least there's a reasonable chance he wrote his own speech. She mentioned Al-Qaeda, but never Osama bin Laden, her party's most glaring and continuous failure. And still, through all this, most media acted like she walked on water in St. Paul last night.

That's because many of my colleagues in the press had been rocked back on their heels by McCain campaign attacks. All those pesky questions about vetting, teen pregnancy, earmarks, support for the "bridge to nowhere", all the stuff we liberals in the media ask about to the exclusion of focusing on Sarah Palin's son, who's about to be deployed to Iraq. Or her love of mooseburgers. When the media is attacked, it often backs up and fawns over the attacker. So it was last night, and probably through the news cycle today.

Sarah Palin can't hide forever, though. Soon she'll actually have to talk to the media, even if it is Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. Soon we'll learn if all those lessons about Kim Jong Il and Nicholas Sarkozy and Hugo Chavez actually stuck in her mind.

Is Sarah Palin the real thing? You tell me.