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The Not-So-Inscrutable Reasons Behind the Sarah Surge
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Posted: Friday, September 12, 2008

ARTICLE
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Publication Date: September 11, 2008

Who are the great unwashed masses driving the Sarah Surge?

It's the question everyone is scrambling to answer this week. Ever since some 37 million viewers watched Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin deliver her stem-winding acceptance speech at the GOP convention last week, Republican Sen. John McCain's stock has soared. A new USA Today/Gallup poll shows McCain leading Democratic Sen. Barack Obama by 10 points among likely voters. Obama's post-convention bounce has faded as the McCain-Palin duo continues to attract exuberant, overflow crowds unlike any McCain saw when campaigning alone.

So who are these Palin fans? Pundits have floated a host of possible answers: They are disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters, independent and swing voters, small businessmen, values voters, blue-collar workers, fiscal conservatives, hunters and sportsmen, pro-lifers, veterans, Reagan Democrats and, my favorite, "Wal-Mart moms." Puzzled by the breadth of Palin's appeal, some commentators have dubbed it, simply, "the X factor."

Far below the network and newsroom perches, on the ground where most Americans live, Palin's popularity is not such a mystery. Consider the circumstances of her national introduction.

By the time Palin took the podium in St. Paul, Minn., she had endured a week of withering personal attacks from a national media establishment that easily could be mistaken for the public relations wing of the Obama campaign. Many viewers sympathized with this accomplished working mother who saw her historic vice-presidential bid devolve into a feeding frenzy on her teenage daughter. They braced themselves for the weak performance media critics had primed them to expect.

Instead, they witnessed the debut of a new conservative luminary: a smart, funny, tough, attractive, no-nonsense woman who makes no apologies for her humble roots and heartland values. After listing her accomplishments as chief executive of a state more than twice the size of Texas with an $11 billion operating budget and 24,000 state employees, she fired back against the Obama campaign's attempts to belittle her small-town start. "In small towns," Palin said, "we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening."

In a choreographed age when candidates hire consultants to make them look like "Alpha Males" and tell them when to roll up their sleeves in TV debates, many voters find Palin's grit and authenticity refreshing. They think a plainspoken woman who bucks her party's good-ole boys and runs her state while raising five kids makes a more plausible president than a former community organizer who spent his single term in the U.S. Senate campaigning for president on hazy promises of hope.

Palin's supporters don't mind that the fashion police sneer at her hair, Keith Olbermann ridicules her religion and Gloria Steinem has expelled her from the sisterhood. They don't think Palin's decision to keep a baby with Down syndrome and declare him "perfectly beautiful" makes her an extremist. They think it makes her a good mom. And they suspect that her values are closer to theirs than those of Obama, who considers the question of when a baby gets human rights "above my pay grade" and opposed both the partial-birth abortion ban and Illinois legislation aimed at protecting babies who survive late-term abortions.

Palin's speech showed how Obama's political advantages -- his celebrity status, cultural affinity with media gatekeepers and soaring-if-short-on-specifics speeches -- double as weaknesses. Her feisty presence in the race has reinvigorated millions of Americans who felt like outsiders in our stage-managed political process but now are enthused about a candidate who seems to understand their lives and values from the inside.

-- Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St. Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.