I find it interesting to see in the e-mails and blogs from the left how they attack Palin because of her controversial, radical, extremist church, yet they have no problem with Barak’s 15 year relationship with Reverend Wright.

I do not agree with some of the stances from her church, but I am not concerned that she is about to restoke the flames of the Inquisition and declare all other faiths heretics.

I am not a Christian, but I am not a Christaphobic, which would be a fear of Christians or Christians who fearlessly and openly profess their faith.

Remember the disgust the media had with Bush during his first campaign when he replied, “Jesus Christ” to the question of who his greatest influence was?

Sarah Palin has been referred to as a ‘Republican Cyborg’- almost too perfect.

She is as real as a woman gets, yet she impresses with a sense of accomplishment and balance few people can imagine.

She is smart, powerful, friendly and feminine. She has a smile and a sense of humor. She could charm the hood off an Eskimo. Palin hunts, shoots, fishes, cooks, helps the kids with homework, and runs the largest state.

It is almost exhausting to even talk about her. What she is not is elitist, Ivy League educated, a lawyer, a community organizer, or self absorbed.

I have been concerned that her biggest liability is her strong pro life stand, but perhaps this is less of a liability than it used to be. Why?

Minorities have big families and sometimes resent abortion as a form of discrimination. Jesse Jackson has criticized the location of abortion clinics in black neighborhoods.

With contraception widely used and accepted, abortion is less of an issue. This may explain Palin’s appeal to the 25 to 40 year old women. They would probably prefer a pro choice stand but it is less of a litmus test issue than it is to the older ‘feminists’.

Catholic voters who were Democratic loyalists, especially amoung the northeast union members could tilt some significant electoral votes toward Palin. Her life style probably resonates with them. Some of them are uncomfortable with Obama, possibly for racial reasons, but more because of his elitism and his otherness. They have someone to run from and someone to run to.

Perhaps this is the result of a demographic shift of three decades of pro life women having more children than the pro choice women. Perhaps NOW’s policies have eliminated their support base.

Has abortion become less of an election issue?

From American Thinker

September 11, 2008
Palin and the Left’s Comprehension Gap
By Dave Smithee

Excerpts

For reasons above my pay grade since it seems to be doing them no favors, the democrats and media cling to and propagate theses curiously garish caricatures about conservatives that would be more at home in the works of Bosch than in any recognizable reality. And not just in private; but as par for the course in the national discussion. For example, Sarah Palin doesn’t merely have ‘flawed policies’. In the space of two weeks, we’ve discovered she’s apparently a power-drunk loon, an anti-Semite, a hypocrite, an unfit mother, a religious fanatic, a redneck escapee from the set of Deliverance, a Nazi sympathizer, and an 18th-century secessionist. All she’s missing is a mustache to twirl.

The reality that forever eludes our left-wing intelligentsia is simple. The bulk of conservatives are not sleeping on dirt floors. We are simply those who have thought beyond step one, and realized that the state is not, and cannot be, the answer. We realize that all of history up to our current disastrous experiments with statism, economic ‘management’, and the disastrous social welfare theories of whites that have been perpetrated on minorities, have proven that conservatism offers the optimal arrangement of social conditions under which individuals, families, communities, and nations thrive. Are there sexists and bigots among the conservative community? As surely as there are those on the left who believe mankind deserves wholesale slaughter for angering Gaia (Greek goddess of Earth), or lunatic professors willing to call slaughtered American civilians ‘Little Eichmans’.

Unlikely, and the ignorance seems all the more entrenched for being entirely self-imposed. Their campaign against Palin will likely consist of the same failed attack strategies that have systematically lowered news coverage on her to the journalistic tenor of Sasquatch sightings. As Sun Tzu might guess, they have every reason to fear the outcome of this particular battle.

For the last few weeks Intrade has been trading a position that Sarah Palin would be withdraw as the VP candidate for Obama. They listed very low odds of about 6%.

The “Palin To Withdraw” position is no longer posted but there is a “Biden to Withdraw” position now listed with the same odds.

from the Corner on National Review Online

by Mark Steyn

First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, “all-American”, but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I’m not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin’ Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who’s done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of “community organizer” and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.

Second, it can’t be in Senator Obama’s interest for the punditocracy to spends its time arguing about whether the Republicans’ vice-presidential pick is “even more” inexperienced than the Democrats’ presidential one.

Third, real people don’t define “experience” as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. (On the first point, at the Gun Owners of New Hampshire dinner in the 2000 campaign, I remember Orrin Hatch telling me sadly that he was stunned to discover how few Granite State voters knew who he was.) Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain’t run nothin’ but his mouth. She’s done the stuff he’s merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party’s corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol (see his campaign’s thuggish attempt to throttle Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg on WGN the other night).

Fourth, Governor Palin has what the British Labour Party politician Denis Healy likes to call a “hinterland” - a life beyond politics. Whenever Senator Obama attempts anything non-political (such as bowling), he comes over like a visiting dignitary to a foreign country getting shanghaied into some impenetrable local folk ritual. Sarah Palin isn’t just on the right side of the issues intellectually. She won’t need the usual stage-managed “hunting” trip to reassure gun owners: she’s lived the Second Amendment all her life. Likewise, on abortion, we’re often told it’s easy to be against it in principle but what if you were a woman facing a difficult birth or a handicapped child? Been there, done that.

Fifth, she complicates all the laziest Democrat pieties. Energy? Unlike Biden and Obama, she’s been to ANWR and, like most Alaskans, supports drilling there.

tips to Douglass Ott

So Sarah Palin did not sell the state plane on E-bay. She listed it but ended up selling through a dealer. Did she say she “sold it on E-Bay” or did she say she “put it on E-Bay”? And then John McCain said she got a profit. The state bought the plane for $2.7 million. She put it on E-Bay for $2.5 million. The dealer sold it for $2.1 million. What was the depreciated price or the book value? If that was lower than $2.1 million then she did sell it for more than book and it was a profit.

Did she try to ban evolution in the schools? No. Just a rumor.

Did she support a Nazi sympathyzer? She wore a Pat Buchanan button when he visited, but she supported Steve Forbes (my favorite candidate) in the 2000 election, not Buchanan. Another false rumor.

Did she fire a town librarian and try to ban books in the library? May be some truth to this. She was pressured to hire the librarian back and did, and said the book banning comment was taken out of context. ???

She attended 6 colleges in 6 years? Appears to be true. So what?

She voted against the bridge to nowhere, but she originally supported it? OK.

And there are a bunch of pictures of her as a young hottie. I like the one in a very high hemmed leather tight skirt and spiked heals. The one in an American flag bikini with a rifle is a digitally synthesized fraud. I don’t know which ones are real.

Palin was sprung on us without a lot of public vetting so we are getting a lot of it now. Some of it is legitimate. We know she is pro Life. Will she try to overturn Roe Vs Wade? To many voters this is a deciding litmus test issue. How tolerant is she of gay lifestyles?

My guess is that she is a woman of action and decision, and that she may likely have made some regrettable decisions. Anyone with leadership experience has, especially when they start in leadership positions so young.

But there seems to be a lot of half truths and deliberate misinformation. We need to learn about her, but be very skeptical about what you read. I have chastised a lot of the lies distributed about Obama. We should be equally intollerant of lies about Palin. Lover her or leave her- base it on the truth, and hopefully something more important than much of the tripe I have been reading.

She comes from a working class background, sports union membership, has fought corrupt Republicans in her state government. She is successful and powerful in her own right, smart, and poised.

If she was pro choice, Sarah Palin would have made an ideal Democrat nominee.

But for her stand on this one litmus test issue, Palin would be the epitome of the role model for the modern woman. Her pro life stand makes her a target for political heresy subject to the kind of viciousness usually reserved for black heretics who dare to be called Republican.

She is tough and fearless. She had no problem turning criticisms into points of attack. “..being mayor of a small town is sort of like being a ‘community organizer’, except you have real responsibilities.”

It is interesting that they compare her experience to Obama, not Biden. She speaks better than Obama; her presentation had more memorable lines and metaphors. She spoke clearly and flawlessly and supposedly with a broken teleprompter. It must infuriate some to a rabid froth that this Alaskan hic can out speak the Ivey League savior, and without the lavish Hollywood props.

Historically VP candidates do not have much impact, and that may or may not be the case here. Rather than placating the opposition, Palin energizes the base. Palin stands for something, and will thus be a force to be reckoned with.