I agree with Mark K that Governor Palin, who kills elk for breakfast, shouldn’t be seen to complain Obama-like about how beastly and mean her opponents are. Years ago in Britain there was a dialogue-free commercial in which a cute chick looked into the camera and put on her lipstick while the soundtrack played some smooth sax instrumental of “Put On A Happy Face”. That’s what Sarah should do: Put on a happy face.
That said…
If you read Obama’s books, you know that his preferred voice is a detached, slightly unknowable cool. He is, in that sense, like an iconic movie star running for president. But, two months out from the big vote, doing a gazillion appearances and interviews a day, you can’t get by on just the detached cool, and whatever’s underneath starts to show.
We already know that Obama is pretty terrible when he’s off the prompter.
We also know that an amazing number of the media-Democrat elite openly loathe Sarah Palin, and everything about her from her alleged Eighties hair to her hillbilly fecundity. Oh, sure, if you press them, they’ll talk about per diems and the bridge to nowhere for a bit, but they’d much rather trash her personally – reviling her as both an uptight fundamentalist and a whip-wielding dominatrix in the same publication on the same day. Given what’s been expressed publicly by Maureen Dowd, Gloria Steinem et al, is it likely that in private the upper echelons of the Obama campaign are immune to the gleeful contempt for Palin expressed by almost all other prominent “liberals”?
And that’s the issue. The problem is not whether Obama’s sexist but whether he’s disciplined enough to keep the public from glimpsing the less attractive elements of liberal-elite condescension. Where now the iconic cool of the snows of Iowa?