The convention sensation

The best line in this year's Republican convention came from Mike Huckabee. Confronting all the gossip about Palin's lack of experience, Huckabee retorted:

"Sarah Palin got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States".

In fact, Biden got some 9000 votes in this year's Democratic primary. (By the way, Hillary Cliton, who was passed over for the VP slot, got 18 million).

And Biden has run for president before, in 1987. Most people have forgotten (or never knew) about Biden's earlier run, but The Economist unceremoniously reminds us in the August 28 edition. In that race, Biden not only borrowed a speech from Neil Kinnock, the British Labor leader, and presented it as his own. He even plagiarized Kinnock's life story, claiming to be the first in his family to go to college and that his ancestors worked in a coal mine (both untrue). Of course, when this came out, Biden's campaign collapsed like a house of cards.

You've got to wonder when and how Biden will blow up in this race. It could get quite spectacular.

Apart from the Huckabee kick, Sarah Palin's own speech was quite a ride. She went after Obama in a way no one has done before, exposing the hypocrisy and self-aggrandizement. A couple of good ones off the top of my head:

- "Obama has written two auto biographies but not authored a single significant bill"
- "We prefer people who don't speak to us one way when they're in Scranton and then in another way when they're in San Francisco" (a dig at Obama's "bitter" comments)
- "Here's a candidate who can give an entire speech about the war in Iraq without once mentioning the word Victory, except when he talks about his own campaign".
- "I guess a mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except you have actual responsibilities".

The reason why the media and the left wing bloggers are going so hard after Palin is because she's dangerous. They all expected an Obama coronation in November, with the elections a minor nuisance on the path to glory. If you saw the Obama Europe tour earlier this year, you may even have thought he'd skipped the US presidential elections all together and was running for world president.

But now this woman comes along and throws a wrench in the plans. Palin is something very unusual in this campaign: She comes across as genuine, a fighter who has taken unpopular positions, fought corruption in her own party, and thrown out incumbents. She connects extremely well with ordinary folks. So clearly the left needs to discredit her achievements. They're throwing the kitchen sink at her and is looking to see what sticks.

The real danger to Obama's campaign here is that Palin is about to reveal what has been the case the whole time: Obama is not the agent of change he proclaims. In his first important decision as candidate, he picked Biden, the 35-year Washington insider, as his sidekick.

And looking at Obama's record, nothing points to the kind of post partisanship or change he talks about all the time. In fact, he completely squandered the opportunity to clean up Chicago politics when he was a state senator (something that would have provided real benefits but also earned him enemies in his own party). He never stood up to the old boys network in Chicago politics, and he has no significant achievements to talk about in the US senate. (By the way, he's been a member of the US senate for 3 1/2 years, half of which (at least) was spent campaigning for president. So I guess that gives him about 1 1/2 years of actual "experience" in the senate.)

The democrats are in trouble and they know it. If Obama loses the freshness and "change" veneer you've got to wonder what is left of his campaign.