What I saw at the tea party

Some of what she said was inaudible in the ballroom. When she said, “We need a commander in chief! ” the audience stood to applaud. Through the din, I watched Palin’s lips continue to move on the giant monitor screens mounted on either side of the stage. An hour and a half later, watching a replay of the speech on C-SPAN, I heard the rest of the sentence: “…not a professor of law standing at the lectern.” When she was speaking live, plowing through her text, I thought she must be late for her plane to Houston, where she was due to address a rally for Governor Rick Perry the next morning, and was gabbling to save every second that she could, in order to get to the airport. Later, I’d see that I was wrong.

The huge standing ovation (“Run, Sarah, Run!”) at the end was more for the concept of Palin, her epiphanic appearance among us in the flesh, than it was for the lackluster speech she’d just delivered. On the way out of the convention center, I heard no one talking about how fired up they were by what they’d heard. In the elevator, a man said, “She messed up some of her lines. She’d’ve been better with a teleprompter.” I reached my room in time to see a reporter from C-SPAN interviewing a young woman in the ballroom lobby about her response to the speech. She thought about the question for a while, and said, carefully, “Well, I didn’t disagree with anything she said.”

Then I watched the replay of the speech on television and was surprised by how much more effective it sounded in my room than it had in life. Palin wasn’t so much speaking to the convention as she was addressing the nation, in its millions of separate rooms like mine. Her rapid, self-interrupting style of delivery was meant for the small screen, where her jokes worked better, and her banalities about policy had the pitch of kitchen-table conversation. It was far from a great speech, and I doubt if it won her many fresh converts, but it sounded a new note in her ever-surprising career: she was trying to find a “presidential” voice, and this was her State of the Union.