Palin and what's his name on rise
THREE months ago in Pennsylvania, John McCain held a town-hall meeting in Philadelphia in front of about 500 people.
Yesterday, more than 10,000 turned up in rural Lancaster County, in the state's south.
Some queued for more than four hours, including Annetta Good, 70. Was she here because of the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain?
She looked sheepish. "No. It's Sarah Palin."
The Governor of Alaska, with staunch anti-abortion views and solid evangelical Christian credentials, has shocked even McCain with her drawing power now that she has joined the ticket as his vice-presidential nominee.
No one inside the camp appears to care if she is swamping the news and overshadowing McCain.
Crowds are flocking to McCain events. Today, McCain's team is expecting more than 18,000 in Fairfax, Virginia, a southern state that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has been hoping to swing to his party for the first time since 1964.
Tension in the tightening race erupted yesterday when Obama, in attempting to describe a McCain-Palin presidency as nothing different to the Bush administration said: "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig."
Seizing on an opportunity -- and news that a fresh poll indicated white women had moved in droves to the McCain-Palin ticket in the past week -- McCain's campaign demanded an apology, saying Obama denigrated Palin.
Palin last week said she was a hockey mum and joked that made her a bit like a pit bull with lipstick.
The Obama camp responded by claiming McCain was trying to play the gender card by focusing on a common analogy.
Obama's senior adviser Anita Dunn said McCain used the same expression last year to describe Hillary Clinton's healthcare plan.
"This phony lecture on gender sensitivity is the height of cynicism and lays bare the increasingly dishonourable campaign John McCain has chosen to run," Dunn said.
But McCain's attacks, with the help of the conservative radio talk-show circuit, is firing up the Republican base.
The fire marshals at yesterday's event in Lancaster were forced to shut the doors with a couple of thousand outside. A stage was set up for McCain to come out later and address them.
But it was Palin who electrified her fans inside. It was an Obama-like reception. As Palin was introduced, there were shouts of "Sarah! Sarah!"
It took 10 minutes for Palin, her husband, Todd -- along with, so the joke goes, "what's his name" -- to get to the podium. "Oh my goodness," Palin drawled in an elongated accent with echoes of a Canadian burr which has already captured the hearts of millions of Americans.
"Thank you so much, it is so great to be here. This is absolutely overwhelming."
Standing in high heels with her adventurer-cum-oil-worker husband by her side, Palin's star appeal is undoubted.
However, her stump speech was nothing new, other than a rendition of the greatest hits from her speech last week in St Paul, Minnesota, when she rocked the Republican Party convention with her self-confidence and her rhetorical evisceration of Obama.
Again, she hammered Obama for saying one thing to working people in one place and something different elsewhere -- a swipe at the Illinois senator's comment earlier this year to a private gathering in San Francisco that working Americans were "bitter" and clinging to religion and guns.
"Wherever he goes, John McCain is the same man," Palin said to a roar. "There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you."
McCain stood by Palin, pointing and acknowledging people in the audience, grinning broadly.
He took the microphone and told the crowd: "You are convincing me more and more we will win the state of Pennsylvania."
It will be a tough fight. Obama holds an advantage here but McCain is gaining. The last time a Republican won in this state was George HW Bush in 1988.
If crowd size is an indicator, it is neck-and-neck. Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, were in Lancaster last week and drew a crowd of the same size. Biden grew up in working-class Scranton, about two hours to the north.
Even so, that huge crowds are turning out for McCain and Palin shows the kind of support that narrowly carried George W.Bush to office in 2000 and 2004.
Her pro-life views swung it for many in the audience, amid doubts among conservatives -- until now at least -- about McCain's own views on abortion and religion.
"He wasn't going to get my vote, until he selected Sarah Palin," said Colleen Ford, 31, holding a 13-month-old baby.
"She's pro-life and she's proved it," she said, referring to Palin's decision to have a baby this year, Trig, despite knowing he would be born with Down syndrome.
Anne Gjerde, 57, said she was planning to abstain from voting this year until Palin was selected.
A new Washington Post/ABC poll yesterday indicated a 20-point shift in white women to the McCain-Palin ticket -- from Obama holding an eight-point edge two weeks ago to a 12-point deficit now. But Obama's campaign manager said the poll was "wrong", and his internal polling didn't support the poll's finding.
source
