If you’re looking for a comprehensive fact-check of Sarah Palin’s web of lies acceptance speech, go here. Setting aside the delivery of the speech, which was quite good, it doesn’t strike me as the best idea to make a first impression as a nearly pathological liar. But your mileage may vary.
Later on today I’ll have access to focus group results that Greenberg Quinlan Rosner gathered from undecided female voters in Nevada. They found no net gain in the group whatsover in terms of which ticket they are leaning towards. She improved her favorability by 10%. Unmarried women felt that she did not address any of their concerns and married women expressed concern that she couldn’t simultaneously perform the job of vice-president and mother (via email).
This candidate provoked a fascinating discussion of gender roles and politics and the challenges this nominee faces. Many women, especially married women, openly questioned her ability to both serve and raise a family, particularly a family involved such a young, special-needs baby. These women acknowledged the obvious double standard (“we would not ask that if she were a man”), but the question lingered. Some even noted, “‘let’s face it, we (women) do the nurturing.”
I have noted the same theme with women I’ve talked to, which I guess opens things up for an interesting debate. As a political matter, I am opposed to raising this argument precisely because it is a double standard. Yet, the double standard is deeply ingrained in our culture and can’t be discounted as a factor in people’s decision making.
On the whole, women in this focus group demonstrated some movement toward McCain/Palin and some movement toward Obama/Biden, but it balanced out exactly. It was a wash among undecided female voters in Nevada.
That’s just a sample and not a very large one. I’d like to know something else, though. For me, her speech left a bad aftertaste. As long as she was up on the screen delivering those sharp remarks with a smile on her face, I felt like she was quite effective. But once her image faded a little bit after I got some sleep, the message sticks out more than the form. And the message was kind of nasty and substanceless. And I’m feeling less impressed with the speech this morning than I was last night. I wonder if other people feel the same way.
