Well, it looks like the candidate in this election who will be the ultimate uniter won't be Barack Obama but Sarah Palin. Yesterday I was booowled over to learn that some rabid, rabid Republicans who live in rural Missouri now agree with me on one thing: They hate Sarah Palin. Hate her. The final nail was Thursday night's VP debate.
Yesterday I called up a friend from my days in Kansas City, just to catch up. His wife's family lives in rural Missouri, and they are all rabid Republicans. They are low-income folks, hate everything liberal (at least as far as they define "liberal"), hate the gays, hate the blacks, you get the picture. In other words, they are those small-town, working-class, white voters who are supposed to be John McCain's bread and butter. They are the type of voters who, according to all those teevee pundits, are supposed to love, love, love Sarah Palin because she's real and "one of them." Gosh darnit.
So in the phone conversation yesterday, our talk eventually turned to politics, as it usually does. My friend told me that his wife's family all gathered together to watch the VP debate on Thursday (we're talking a dozen or so people). Then he paused.
I knew that pause. Usually my friend pauses like that right before he's about to tell me something he knows I'm not going to like. So I braced myself.
"What did they think?" I eventually asked him to break the silence.
"They hated her," my friend responded.
My fellow kossacks, I almost spit out my coffee!
"What didn't they like?" I asked in utter amazement.
"Everything. They hated everything about her."
It turns out that they really, really, really, really did not like the fact that Palin flat out did not answer many of the questions. They found that to be outrageous. After all, the entire reason they were watching the debate was to see her answer questions, doggone it.
They also did not like all her attempts to be folksy. To them it just came off as, um, I think the word they used was "phony." In fact, the candidate who seemed to them to be real and more like them was not Sarah Palin but Joe Biden.
The women, in particularly, did not like Palin's flirty, winky act. That went over like a lead balloon. And both the men and the women did not like her "Can I Call You Joe" schtick. They found that to be disrespectful to Senator Biden.
Many of the people in this family probably can't bring themselves to vote for Obama, according to my friend. But after Thursday night's debate, a lot of them have decided that they can't vote for McCain either. So they just might sit this one out.
You can let the pundits like Peggy "Famous Person" Noonan go on and on about how Sarah Palin "killed" in the debate. But based on everything I'm hearing and seeing from "real" voters, including this truly shocking news I got out of small-town Missouri yesterday, the only thing that Sarah Palin "killed" on Thursday night was John McCain's election chances.
UPDATE:
I forgot to mention that the people I'm talking about here are not evangelical fundamentalists. An important point, I think. The fundies will follow Palin off a cliff, but increasingly they're the only people still clapping hard for Palin.