Feisty Palin connects inside convention and with voters outside

ST. PAUL, MINN.

Conventional wisdom - heck, common sense - tells us it isn't good politics for a vice presidential candidate to eclipse the guy at the top of the ticket. Yet that's what happened at the Republican National Convention this week.

Oddly enough, this upside-down attention might be just what the low-key John McCain campaign needed.

The media's attacks on Sarah Palin, way beyond legitimate questions about the Alaska governor's qualifications, ginned up unprecedented interest in the mother of five's veep acceptance speech and, consequently, the convention.

Here at the Xcel Energy Center on Thursday, political buttons with a pink heart encircling two words, "Sarah Palin," flew off the shelves.

So did ones emblazoned with Palin's picture and "The Hottest VP, The Coolest State."

According to some news reports, 37 million viewers tuned in to see Palin's speech. That's about 13 million more than watched Joe Biden's acceptance the week before and almost as many as watched Barack Obama's stadium speech in Denver.

Apparently Americans wanted to see this lightning rod from Alaska for themselves.

The feisty governor put her photogenic family front and center and came out like a Cat. 5 hurricane. She directed her barbs not only at her political opponents but toward the press corps.

When she stood up to the bullies with their laptops, the crowd went wild.

We know that by choosing Palin, McCain shored up the conservative Republican base. In the weeks to come, we'll find out if her presence on the ticket and her fiery speech brought in any new voters.

I suspect it did. Unless, of course, there are serious skeletons in the Alaskan's closet.

On Thursday morning, as I climbed into a cab in Minneapolis for the 20-minute ride to St. Paul, the driver greeted me with a smile and asked if I was a delegate.

When I said I wasn't, he confessed he was an Obama supporter, something he'd been keeping under wraps as he shuttled GOP delegates between their hotels and the Xcel Energy Center.

He was a naturalized citizen, he said, from Somalia, with a deep interest in American politics.

The discussion shifted, as they all seem to this week, to The Speech.

"It was pretty good," he shrugged. "But she said nothing about health care.... I have insurance but it's no good.... My co-pays are too high."

I asked him what his wife thought about the speech.

The man smiled at me in the rear-view mirror.

"She liked it," he said. "She liked it a lot."

He didn't know if she'd vote Republican, he admitted.

As I thought about it later, it occurred to me that if a moose-hunting mother of five from Alaska was able to connect on some level with an African immigrant living in Minnesota, she did what she set out to do Wednesday night.

Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net