The press did Sarah Palin and the GOP a huge favor!

By their relentless campaign of personal destruction, they caused a powerful backlash among voters in favor of Sarah. Furthermore, their attempts to paint Sarah as completely out of her league had the effect of significantly reducing expectations for her performance Wednesday night..and, in doing so, unwittingly created a vacuum into which she stepped with grace and aplomb.

The press focused the attention of the entire nation on her speech, arguing that it would prove their claims of her incompetence. Instead, her magnificent performance did exactly the opposite. They unleashed a pit bull only to have it bite them in the rear.

In the oddest example of turn-about, the press illuminated Sarah’s star in much the same way that Vladimir Putin boosted John McCain with his invasion of Georgia.

It’s been a great fortnight for the Republican Party.

In exactly the same vein, here’s an excerpt from Jeffrey Bell’s article in The Weekly Standard…

But even apart from its political implications, the rollout of the Sarah Palin vice presidential candidacy may be regarded decades from now as a nationally shared Rorschach test of enormous cultural significance.

From the instant of Palin’s designation on Friday, August 29, the American left went into a collective mass seizure from which it shows no sign of emerging. The left blogosphere and elite media have, for the moment, joined forces and become indistinguishable from each other, and from the supermarket tabloids, in their desire to find and use anything that will criminalize and/or humiliate Palin and her family. In sharp contrast to the yearlong restraint shown toward truthful reports about John Edwards’s affair, bizarre rumors have been reported as news, and, according to McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt, nationally known members of the elite media have besieged him with preposterous demands.

The most striking thing in purely political terms about this hurricane of elite rage is the built-in likelihood that it will backfire. It’s not simply that it is highly capable of generating sympathy for Palin among puzzled undecided voters and of infuriating and motivating a previously placid GOP base, neither of which is in the interest of the Obama-Biden campaign. It also created an opening for Palin herself to look calm, composed, competent, and funny in response.

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Tags: 2008 Election, GOP, Jeffrey Bell, McCain, McCain-Palin, media, MSM, Palin, POLITICS, Sarah Palin, The Weekly Standard