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Palin and the mastery of illusion

Why the style trumps the substance

(In fairness to Palin, the howler of the night was uttered by Mike Huckabee, who wowed the crowd with this bit of lunatic arithmetic: Palin "got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States." Well, let's see here....Biden got 75,165 votes in the primaries. Palin got 616 votes in her first mayoral race, and 909 in her second, for a grand total of 1,525. I just checked my calculator, and 75,165 is a larger number than 1,525. I trust that even though Palin, like Huckabee, would like to see creationism taught in the public schools, surely she would endorse the continued teaching of math skills, even if her surrogates are exposed as fabulists.)

It also might have been interesting last night to hear Palin discuss the national security credentials that warrant placing her a heatbeat away from power in the 9/11 era; perhaps she could have repeated McCain's line about how she is qualified because "Alaska is right next to Russia."

But I doubt that much of this matters. Substance can't compete with style and symbolism. In particular, as communications expert (and occasional Democratic advisor) George Lakoff put it the other day, Republicans are traditionally "strong on the symbolic dimension of politics."

A perky, rootin'-tootin' hockey mom who drives herself to work...that's iconic small-town stuff, an appealing cultural metaphor for those everyday Americans who think that all Washington needs is a dose of everyday gumption. It's an illusion, of course, because it masks the reality of the Washington Republican elite, and the manner in which that elite has long operated, but election campaigns have long turned on the mastery of illusion. That's the abiding genius of the GOP. They've made a hash of governing since Bush came to town, but they sure can market.