By selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain plunged his campaign into the plot of a Frank Capra film.
Frank Capra heroes -- such iconic characters as Longfellow Deeds, Jefferson Smith, John Doe, and George Bailey, portrayed by Gary Cooper (Deeds and Doe) and Jimmy Stewart (Smith and Bailey) -- came from small towns, embodied rural values, were improbably propelled into the public spotlight, were assailed by urban sophists and sophisticates who did the bidding of monied interests, and prevailed against great odds through dint of grit, honesty, and dumb luck.
From the moment McCain picked Palin, his campaign was almost compelled to depict her as a Capra hero. Not only was she made for the part, but McCain's managers surely knew that the media would scramble to find out the details -- for that matter, the rudiments -- of Palin's life and career. Capra himself had turned prying reporters and editors into heavies in several of these films (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in particular), and when Republicans don't quite know whom to run against, they have long employed the media as a handy target in their faux-populist war against cultural elites.
On Wednesday night, then, it was Sarah Palin standing up for real Americans against the networks, the cosmopolitans, and the community organizers, who seem to have replaced communists in Republican demonology. Perhaps the weirdest moment of the evening came when Rudy Giuliani -- the cross-dresser of high-dollar New York GOP fundraisers -- suggested that "Barack Obama feels that [Palin's] hometown isn't cosmopolitan enough. Not flashy enough."
Defending the integrity of rural life came more naturally to Palin than to Rudy. She spoke of her life as a hockey mom and a small town mayor -- but "our opponents look down on that experience," she said. "If you're not a member of the Washington elite," she added, some consider you "unqualified for that reason alone."
At which point, the delegates began chanting against NBC. The McCain campaign clearly hopes to pre-discredit anything dubious that the media discovers about Palin. But like many of this evening's tropes -- the attacks on the Democrats for supporting bigger government and higher taxes, and opposing military actions against our enemies -- the Republican war on the media is musty with mothballs, a battle they have been waging since the days when Richard Nixon (taking a cue from George Wallace) first devised a faux-populism that attacked cultural rather than economic elites.
Palin's efforts to get some books banned from the Wassila library are not likely to win her many votes among professionals who are also independent voters, but those are plainly not the voters whom McCain's strategists are targeting. Palin is playing the country mouse who smacks down the city mouse for the edification of all the country mice of central Pennsylvania and southeastern Ohio. The question on which the election hinges is whether these aging voters in their decaying towns still respond to these attacks, or if they're more troubled that Palin and McCain offer nothing to allay their economic anxieties, or that Palin has still failed to show that she's ready to be president. Republicans love Palin for the enemies she claims to have made, but this year the accumulation of such enemies may not sway the votes it once did.
Nor does her antagonism to liberal elites mean that she's passed all the tests of a Capra hero. Capra's beleaguered, determined protagonists, after all, don't let us down. They don't make a show of embracing their own unwed pregnant daughters and then veto funds, as Palin did, to provide shelter to pregnant teens. They don't profess to defend the public against big money while really representing big money all along. Indeed, when Gary Cooper's John Doe realizes that a media mogul is using him precisely to those ends, he walks away from the mogul's campaign.
What Palin showed us on Wednesday night was her ability to deliver a speech compellingly (precisely the accusation the Republicans hurl at Barack Obama) and to take up the banner of cultural populism. What she did not demonstrate was the ability to speak with authority about the great issues of the day -- about globalization and its reshuffling of great power relations, about globalization and its effect on the American economy. She's an effective tribune for McCain's campaign, but nothing in her speech suggested she's ready to move into the Oval Office. And it's the misgivings about her readiness -- and about McCain's own judgment -- that the campaign must dispel if it means to prevail in November.
