On the Road: Carson City, Nevada

[ccharles000]

Taxes. Guns. Land. Drill. ("Drill, Baby, Drill!") And Sarah Palin is One Of Us. That’s the message here in Nevada. Almost nothing about John McCain. Sarah Palin is running for de facto President. And “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” may close every Obama speech, but Palin bounded on stage just after it played.

First off, the program was delayed by several hours, which allowed extra time to canvass the line for thoughts on the woman the crowd excitedly waited to see. Lots of first-time political rally attendees, though I strained to find independents. (Not that they necessarily weren't there, they just may not have been as eager to openly discuss their ambivalence while standing in line.) Palin is a champion precisely because she seems to be common folk. That she's just a regular person is not a minus, it's a plus with this crowd. The Western anti-incumbency sentiment runs high, and when she repeatedly told the crowd that she was "gonna shake things up” in Washington, they roared.

Palin's 17-minute speech was a brief run through of her time as Alaska governor, with nothing about Nevada-specific issues, no attacks on Obama-Biden (but two mentions of the need to help after Ike), and maybe one minute devoted to vouching for John McCain’s character, if not his policy positions.

Even if she doesn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is, she began with the Reagan Doctrine – “Government is not always the answer to the problem, government is the problem.” She said she’d eliminated personal property taxes in Alaska and cut taxes on small businesses. Despite the damaging and contradictory pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post already online by the time of the speech, she touted her ending of “the closed door policy” in Alaskan politics, and essentially her routing of the lobbyists, who apparently no longer have any power in her state.


http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/on-road-carson-city-nevada.html