Ace of Spades is liveblogging Sarah Palin’s rally in Carson, CA today. Says he will have pictures of the Carson crowd later. Jon Voigt was one of her openers, and he seems to have warmed up the crowd quite effectively. Browsing through what Ace catches of Palin’s speech once she does get up there (the over-capacity crowd loves her, of course), most of what she says sounds like a series of rote crowd-pleasers, which is standard for a rally of this type. Not all of it, though. A couple of exceptions:
1) The one that’s making it all over the news is her accusation that Barack Obama is “palling around with terrorists,” in reference to William Ayers (quote in video at about 1:35). That’s one way to get Ayers’s name back in the media; I’m guessing it was spurred at least in part by the NYTimes’s whitewash of Obama’s relationship to Ayers in today’s edition. (Instapundit has more; take note of his reader John’s email.) It’s a good thing that this line is turning into the newsmaker of the day, because it looks like it’s crowding out the other exception, which is the reason behind this post’s title.
2) This is just painful. Ace (via Gateway Pundit) reports Palin telling the crowd, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support women.” Oh, groooooan…! Thanks a heap, Governor. In one sentence, you’ve combined the most teeth-grinding rhetoric of both the left (emotional blackmail through identity politics) and the right (ranting that your opponents are hellbound). According to Ace: “Says she wasn’t sure how that would go over, wants to know how the media will twist it.”
That just makes my head hurt. Unbelievable…she even knows what a risk she was taking with that line. If the press actually does ignore that horror show of a sound bite in favor of her earlier “palling around with terrorists” line, she will have dodged a potentially lethal bullet, in my opinion.
Unforced errors like that for a candidate in her position are just way too stupid. It’s one thing to run a campaign against the media; it’s quite another to bait the media unnecessarily. Just ask Gary Hart.
UPDATE: Bless you, dear commenter ArmyWife (here, have a link!), who has informed me that Gov. Palin was deliberately cribbing a line from a fluffy TIME Magazine interview with Madeleine Albright from earlier this year. Whew! That is a huge load off my mind. Sorry, folks, Ace didn’t include that context; clearly liveblogging amid a huge crowd required brevity on his part. Sounds much better when used ironically, doesn’t it? (Also explains why the media folk aren’t pouncing on it.)
Looking back at Gateway Pundit’s post, I see I was remiss (distraught over the “special place” line, I guess!) in not giving Sarah due credit for one of the best lines of the campaign so far at Obama’s expense:
Just once it would be nice if he said he wanted our country to win!
She isn’t cracking up. She can still pop off a great one-liner. OK, fine, feels like I’m back from the Spock-has-a-beard universe now.
UPDATE II: Still no Ace photos, but here’s one from an Instapundit emailer: