Palin Tonight

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So here we are... almost.

Sarah Palin -- the supremely unqualified one -- is set to make her long-awaited and much-ballyhooed prime-time appearance at the Republican Convention in about an hour. Stay tuned for our coverage.

For now, a few pre-speech comments. (Update: NRO's The Corner has excerpts from her speech. It is pretty much as expected, though, as CNN is reporting, she will be taking a few despicable snipes at Obama.)

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I'm not as pessimistic as Libby, who predicts, among other things, that "Palin will give a great speech," that "[t]he GOP base will go wild," and that the punditocracy will call her pick "a gamechanger," but I do think she has a lot going for her tonight:

Expectations are so incredibly low, given everything that has come out over the past several days, that all she has to do to exceed them is to speak coherently and come across like she has a clue -- and, if possible, tell her story with conviction, eliciting compassion, and connect with hockey moms and soccer dads around the country, those mythical "real" Americans whose support is seemingly so essential in the lowest-common-denominator world of American politics.

Furthermore, the party has already circled the wagons in her defence.

What this means is that she already enjoys the goodwill of much, if not most, of her party. She is the candidate of choice for the theocratic right, celebrated by the likes of James Dobson, and the rest of the party has come to see this as a battle between their party and the entire media establishment. Republicans thrive on self-victimization, on narrative of their own manufacturing that pit the world against them, and, if nothing else, the Palin pick has fed into that narrative and energized the party, or at least its base and extremist ideologues.

So my predication is that she will easily exceed expectations, which Republicans like to keep low (think GWB), though more in style than in substance, the latter of which will be the usual combination of nationalist, theocratic, and libertarian platitudes. She will give a good speech, that is, much to the delight and overeager applause of the assembled. She will look good, sound good, and say what the party wants to hear. I am less certain that the media will lap it up -- they may be an outlet for Republican talking points, but they also like to do that "gotcha" investigative work, and, to them, Palin is the gift that keeps on giving -- but Republicans will, and the media will report on how energized the party is going into McCain's speech tomorrow night.

Now, as to saying what she needs to say, the key for her will be to tell her story, to define herself, and to inject some gravitas into her candidacy. She won't be able to do to Obama what Biden did to McCain, given her own supreme unqualifications, but she will be able to come across as, in her own way, a historic and courageous pick, at least to her party. Again, there is a limit to what she will be able to accomplish. She won't be able to wipe the slate clean, nor will she be able to pretend to be what she is not -- i.e., qualified -- but this pick was more about energizing the base and securing the support of the theocrats than anything else. In that sense -- and I can't quite believe I'm saying this -- it has already proven to be quite a success. (In the larger sense, with electoral success as the measure, I think it's an abject failure -- for McCain.)

So get ready. It's Palin Time. And we'll be back later with more.