Last week I questioned whether Sarah Palin would appeal to small-town women as much as the GOP assumes she will. This was a criticism coming from my own small-town roots.

Although I realize anecdotal evidence needs to be taken with a big grain of salt, I call your attention to “Sarah Palin’s appeal to working-class women may be limited” in today’s Los Angeles Times. The reporters, Faye Fiore and Peter Wallsten, interviewed women in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and found them to be, um, underwhelmed by Sarah Palin. Many were turned off by Palin’s meanness and sarcasm.

When Palin belittled Obama’s history as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side — suggesting he was a do-little activist while she, as the former mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska, had “actual responsibilities” — Sandy Ryan, 59, clicked the remote.

“That’s enough of that. I switched over to ‘House Hunters,’ ” she said with some disgust over dessert with a group of women from the senior housing complex she manages. …

… Patty Tobal, a 63-year-old retired nurse and lifelong feminist, shut off the TV set and went to bed. The promise of a woman on the ticket had piqued her curiosity, but she found Palin’s sarcasm offensive and her priorities out of touch.

This was not the reaction Republicans were expecting.

But Republican strategists hope that Palin’s middle-class roots, union-member husband and love of hunting will help her connect to rural and small-town folks in battleground states such as Pennsylvania.

This is, after all, a place where schools close on the opening day of deer hunting season, people are conflicted about abortion rights and racial bias still simmers.

Sara Taylor, former Bush White House political affairs director, described Palin as a “living, breathing replica of the middle class” who “connected with people in a way we haven’t seen a national figure do in a long time.”

Usually, a “replica” is a “fake.” Possibly a bad choice of words. But what does it say about the GOP that they think all small-town people are alike, and that they’re all such hayseeds they’ll swoon for the pretty governor who shoots her own venison?

I mean, who’s the real elitist here?

This is interesting —

Recent surveys suggest that Palin, who opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest, is not necessarily poised to help McCain with moderate women. A National Journal/Hotline daily tracking poll released Friday found that 49% of male voters say Palin is prepared to be president but that only 41% of female voters think so.

There may be something like a Bradley Effect among those male voters. Women may feel more free to say to a pollster what they really think about Palin — that she is not prepared to be president — than some men, who may be reluctant to say it even if they think it.

More evidence she’s not prepared — some of Palin’s record as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, from the Wall Street Journal:

The biggest project that Sarah Palin undertook as mayor of this small town was an indoor sports complex, where locals played hockey, soccer, and basketball, especially during the long, dark Alaskan winters.

The only catch was that the city began building roads and installing utilities for the project before it had unchallenged title to the land. The misstep led to years of litigation and at least $1.3 million in extra costs for a small municipality with a small budget. What was to be Ms. Palin’s legacy has turned into a financial mess that continues to plague Wasilla.

But, y’know, it doesn’t matter that someone who can’t get a bleeping sports complex right might become President of the United States. All that matters is that she annoys liberals.

Josh Marshall:

There’s a lot of complaining that the McCain campaign won’t allow anyone to interview Sarah Palin. And for the major news outlets that would be in line for such an interview there’s a logic to keeping up the drumbeat. But McCain campaign manager Rick Davis is right: It’s their campaign to run. They can do it how they want. Everyone else should just shut up, stop complaining and call the reality for what it is.

Davis says Palin won’t give any interviews until she feels “comfortable” giving one. And this morning he added that she wouldn’t give any “until the point in time when she’ll be treated with respect and deference.”

Sarah Palin could be the President of the United States in four and a half months. We tend to think of this as an abstraction; but it’s true. And yet today she’s so unprepared and knows so little about the challenges and tasks facing the country that she can’t even give a softball interview.

Since when have Americans treated politicians with respect and deference? Lady, if you want to be treated with respect and deference, be a nun. Otherwise, learn to roll with it like the rest of us.

Pulling back the curtain on the Republican fantasy machine….

CBS News: On Tuesday night, 15-year-old Victoria Blackstone, a sophomore at the St. Agnes School in St. Paul, led the crowd at the Xcel Energy Center in the Pledge of Allegiance. The audience heard her 434-word essay, “Pledging myself to the Flag of the United States of America”… The RNC turned that essay into a three and a half minute video, a visually stirring montage rolling over Victoria’s words about sharing the Pledge with Americans who have stood at important moments in history.

It was a video that was supposed to elicit soaring patriotism and real emotions about the Pledge of Allegiance. But to do that, it used fake soldiers and a staged military funeral instead of the real thing…

DailyKos: Apparently, the Republicans couldn’t find very many African American supporters to show on the Big Screen Of Triumph, when introducing McCain… so they simply put up stock photos of black people. You know, riding bicycles and appreciating their moms and stuff…

At Drinking Liberally last night, we counted to 12, the total number of non white people spotted at the RNC during McCain’s speech, out of about 20,000 attendees. Guess that explains the need for stock photos. At least they didn’t, to our reckoning, pepper the XCel Center with cardboard cutouts.

Remember that weird image of a large building on a green lawn that briefly flashed behind McCain last night? TPM reports: “It has been brought to the school’s attention that a picture of the front of our school, Walter Reed Middle School, was used as a backdrop at the Republican National Convention. Permission to use the front of our school for the Republican National Convention was not given by our school nor is the use of our school’s picture an endorsement of any political party or view”, declares principal Donna Tobin.

TPM continues: The California Democratic Party is actually holding a press conference in front of the school… where Dems will hit McCain for not knowing the difference between the school and Walter Reed Medical Center, which is believed to be the backdrop the McCain campaign really wanted.

These people used to be very good at this sort of thing. Are they getting sloppy, or are we getting smarter? Or do they think nobody will notice anyway?

UPDATE: More pulling back the curtain – Rachel Maddow, uses the “L” word, at long last. I cannot tell you how long I’ve been waiting for someone, anyone, in the media to tell it like it is.

There is widespread consensus today that McCain’s speech sucked out loud. And it wasn’t just McCain’s clunky delivery, which featured creepy smiles at inappropriate times (Dubya does that too, come to think of it). Attaturk asks,

So I say with some incredulity, how could his speech — which he had MONTHS to work on and was written especially for him (as opposed to Palin’s being adapted for her) SUCK. SO. VERY. MUCH?!

I say there’s something weirdly unfocused about the McCain campaign. It’s as if no one is really in charge, and the worker bees in it are just stumbling along as best they can.

The convention showed a video of 9/11 last night. I didn’t watch it. You may know I was in lower Manhattan that day, and I don’t care to relive the experience, thank you very much. As soon as the video came on I switched channels. Now some are saying showing the video crossed a line.

Yes, probably so. However, I wonder if 9/11 packs much of an emotional wallop to most people any more. Those of us who were there will always have a raw spot about 9/11. Righties cling to it because it stokes their much-cherished sense of righteous victimhood. But what about the rest of the country?

This misleading headline to the contrary, we won’t really know what effect the GOP convention had on the electorate until Tuesday or Wednesday. I’m no good at predicting these things, but I will be surprised if the Republicans get much of a bounce out of that mess of a convention.

Today Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein both talk about the politics of ressentiment. We know the one thing that fuels the Right, their raison d’etre, is their seething resentment of everyone who isn’t them.

Most of all, they resent liberals. Back when there was at least some part of the federal government they didn’t control, they got a lot of mileage out of scapegoating the “liberal elite” for everything that seemed to go wrong. Now they are singing the same song, as if they themselves hadn’t controlled both Congress and the White House and the entire federal bureaucratic apparatus for most of the past eight years. Tom Shales wrote,

He [McCain] used the word “change” at least 10 times in his bombastic speech — the convention’s emotional climax — but since the Republicans have controlled the White House for the past eight years, what does McCain want to change from? And to? It really is an audacious ploy, to tell people that the country’s got to correct the mistakes made by a political party when that’s the very party you represent.

It’s like staging a revolution against yourself — saying that the Republicans have got to go so the Republicans can move in and clean up the mess.

So, the pundits say, they are attempting to “rebrand” the GOP, to persuade America it’s not the party of George W. Bush any more. So McCain uses the word “change” a lot, and speaker after speaker called him a “maverick” (or “mavrick” according to one delegate with a home-made sign). But what do they offer?

• A video of 9/11. Yeah, that doesn’t remind us of Dubya.
• Tax cuts.
• Lots of tributes to Ronald Reagan.
• Tax cuts.
• Tough talk against our enemies, whoever they are this week.
• Tax cuts.
• And seething, pulsing, sneering resentment of liberals.

This is “re-branding”?

They find one outsider, one fresh face, in Sarah Palin, and they gave her a speech to deliver that Karl Rove could have written himself. It was all sneer and snark. Same old product with a new product spokesperson. This is not “re-branding.” It’s not even “re-packaging.” But it’s who they are.

I said earlier today:

In order to reach out to persuadable “swing” voters, IMO he [McCain] needs to show he understands peoples’ economic concerns and has some idea what he’s going to do to address them. He needs also to persuade listeners that his administration would not be a copy of George Bush’s. I think some vague noises about “reform” and “change” are not going to do that; he needs to call out specifics.

I don’t believe this speech accomplished that. Right now, as I keyboard, Chris Matthews is saying that McCain’s speech “divorced” McCain from the Bush Administration. But as Rachel Maddow points out, every economic proposal in this speech was no other than George Bush’s economic policy. No difference. It shouldn’t be that hard for the Obama campaign to remarry Bush to McCain. Even if Bush isn’t speaking to McCain after tonight.

If I were someone out-of-work, or worried about losing a job, or without health insurance, or about to lose my house, I don’t believe I would have heard anything in that speech that gave me hope. McCain mentioned those things but offered nothing new to correct the problems.

What’s going on here? I understand movement conservatives believe Republicans lost seats in 2006 because of corruption scandals, out-of-control spending, probably immigration. In their hearts, they don’t believe their “free market,” “privatize everything” policies are the problem.

The delegates, they’re saying, are still more jazzed about Sarah Palin than they are about John McCain. But I don’t think Sarah Palin will turn out to be the magic candidate that will sell the ticket to independents and swing voters, for reasons discussed in the last two posts. This is particularly true if the McCain campaign keeps her hidden away so the press can’t get to her, as reports say they will do.

My question, earlier this evening, was whether McCain would deliver a speech for the delegates or for the nation. What I think happened was that the speech was intended for the nation, but it failed because McCain and his speechwriters don’t know how to talk to the nation.

I hate these schmaltzy videos. Volume off.

OMG, you mean McCain was a POW? Wow. Who knew?

I realized tonight that I am older than Cindy McCain. Depressing. I skipped her speech because I was watching the replay of last night’s Project Runway. How was it?

Note to self — when I’m old and gray, no double strands of pearls. Ever. They make you look like Barbara Bush.

Did you know McCain was a POW? They should talk about this more often.

The Dems had more flags. The GOP has more White People.

OOO, somebody has a “McCain votes against vets” sign.

He’s praising Bush for keeping us safe from terriers.

Mama McCain looks amazing for 96.

Somebody poke me when McCain says something substantive.

What’s going on in the audience?

“Please don’t be diverted by the ground noise and the static.” Please don’t be distracted by somebody exercising her first amendment rights.

What’s with the “USA USA” chanting?

Again, somebody poke me when McCain says something substantive.

I believe that if McCain announced he could pick his own nose, the delegates would give him a standing ovation.

He fought lobbyists who stole from Indian tribes? He fought Abramoff and Ralph Reed?

Lots of vacant bleachers in that hall.

How could withdrawal from Iraq have “risked a wider war”?

Has he said anything substantive yet?

Gawd, I’m bored.

Oh, he says he doesn’t believe in government that makes choices for us. Unless you’re pregnant.

McCain: Lie lie lie lie lie lie lie.

McCain: My plan is better. Trust me. Don’t bother yourself about the details.

He still hasn’t said anything substantive. Oh, he’s going to send people to community colleges for re-training. For WHAT?

The re-education thing is a crock. No point re-educating people for jobs that don’t exist.

He’s supporting school vouchers? That’s so last year.

McCain, in a nutshell: When I’m president, everybody gets a pony.

Has he said anything substantive yet?

Republicans wear more stupid hats than Dems do.

He used to be a POW!

Audience: Drunk or bored. No middle ground.

He used the word change.

The constant partisan rancor … that the GOP thrives on.

McCain: I’m better than Obama. Trust me.

Gawd, this is an awful speech.

BooMan has a response.

I had no idea he used to be a POW.

This is a dreadful speech. It’s not just the delivery, which is clunky. The speech itself is bad.

I will never forgive the North Vietnamese for this. I hope they’re watching.

Oh, please, make it stop.

History has anointed him to save the country in its hour of need? Is that what he just said?

Some moran is holding up a sign saying “mavrick.”

Oh, we’re saved. He’s done.

Did he say anything substantive?

My instant analysis — he spoke of many economic problems, but he didn’t speak to them, or provide anything resembling plans for solving them.

Josh Marshall: “I question the wisdom of not letting anyone in the auditorium under 50.”

Ron Beasley: “John McCain and the Republicans had better hope that most people were watching the football game.”

The bobbleheads are asking if the speech worked outside the hall. I don’t think it did. It was boring and content-free.

There was a list of vague objectives — jobs, cheaper energy, health care — no indication he has half a clue how to do these things.

The town I grew up in had, as I recall, a population of about 4,500. Since I moved away it has merged with three other nearby towns to form a municipality of 7,861, spread out over 20 square miles. When I was growing up the nearest city, St. Louis, was at least an hour and a half away by car. The school districts of the four towns merged back in the 1960s, which caused my graduating class to jump from maybe 20 kids to (I’m going from hazy memory here) about 80. Yee-haw.

I bring this up to establish my small-town cred. Now, my impression of Sarah Palin:

There’s someone like her in every small town — the alpha female who organizes all the bake sales and parades and Pancake Day and around whom the town’s society, if you want to call it that, swirls. Other women defer to her because she’s more energetic and assertive than they, and she’s probably very good at organizing the bake sales and parades and Pancake Day. They probably admire her for that.

But they don’t necessarily like her.

Watching Palin last night, especially when the family — including the pregnant daughter and boyfriend — joined her on the stage, made me wonder if small-town women would love her, as the GOP hopes, or whether she would remind them of that pushy Sally Ledbetter whom they’ve wanted secretly to tell off since high school. I think it could go either way.

The unmarried pregnant daughter factor probably doesn’t shock too many people. In small, isolated, conservative towns, pregnant teenagers are as constant as sun and rain. But it does make Palin seem no-larger-than-life. Meaning, she’s no Hillary Clinton.

Palin has lived her life as a big fish in a small pond. Now she’s in the ocean, where there are other fish a whole hell of a lot bigger than she is. She may not have realized this yet. She’s going to be on an interesting learning curve the next couple of months.

What struck me about last night’s speech was a lack of the Vision Thing. She didn’t talk about America as much as she talked about herself and John McCain, with some cheap digs at Obama. To connect with voters she presented herself as someone you might run into at the Rotary Club picnic. What I didn’t hear was that she had a clue about the real kitchen-table concerns of the people on the other side of the television screen.

She used the words “change” and “reform” a lot, but for the life of me I can’t tell what changes in Washington she wants to make. It sounded more like the same old wingnut shit. Cut taxes. Cut more taxes. Cut essential services. Cut taxes again. Promise “small government,” whatever they mean by that. They’ve been promising small government for at least 30 years, and it ain’t getting smaller.

I think Americans are in the mood for a government that can actually do something other than start wars. And I think small-town Americans realize that being chief executive of the United States is a lot more difficult than organizing Pancake Day.

Eve Fairbanks writes at TNR:

That’s the problem with the positive case Palin made for herself, with its emphasis on all that small-town stuff: It convinced me that she makes a good PTA mom, that she may make a fine mayor, that she hasn’t totally bombed as the essentially brand-new governor of the third-least-populous state in the Union, even that I might like to have a beer with her, or a glass of fermented whale milk or whatever one drinks with mooseburgers. But just because we’re a nation of a hundred thousand Wasillas doesn’t mean all those hundred thousand mayors ought to be in the White House. Tonight, she sounded for all the world like an unusually sharp version of those “regular people” they drag onstage at conventions to tell their stories in the off-primetime hours.

I don’t think we need to bring Palin down by ridiculing her, tempting though that might be. It would just buy her sympathy. We need to let the American people know when she’s lying (I’m still waiting for the fact checks on her speech), but other than that, just step aside and let America have a good look at her.