It took Ronald Reagan 14 years to create a confident, optimistic Republican Party. Gov. Sarah Palin did it in six fraught days. Her introductory odyssey concluded with the great exhale of Wednesday night when the vice presidential nominee joined the thin ranks of performers who possess the power to astound.
Palin displayed the champion's most elusive talent: She made it look easy. The past two weeks saw a few hundred of the nation's most ambitious, familiar politicians mount their party's podium straining to make an address memorable. Most failed.
Palin on Wednesday, like Barack Obama in Iowa on Jan. 3, delivered a speech that demolished the campaign's assumptions. In Iowa, Obama was no pushover. In St. Paul, Palin wasn't Ma Kettle.
For her first five days as John McCain's running mate, Palin took a shelling from a congress of the usual suspects — and some unlikely detractors — that would have disoriented the toughest veterans. Her critics finally found something they wanted to drill for. Sweet crude vitriol gushed.
In all due deference to Palin, she only reignited a conservative flame that still existed but had been pissed on by the republican brand for the last 10 years.
It took Reagan 14 years because for decades conservatives like Barry Goldwater had been portrayed as "kooks".
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