So first Matt Damon said this:
It’s like a really bad Disney movie. The Hockey Mom. “Oh, I’m just a hockey mom from Alaska,” and she’s facing down Vladimir Putin using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink. It’s absurd. It’s totally absurd, and I don’t understand why more people aren’t talking about how absurd it is. […] I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago.
And then some twisted genius actually went ahead and made that movie (okay, just the trailer).
Memo to Matt: what we’ve learned for sure about Palin in the last 2 weeks is that even aside from the rabidly anti-abortion stance and book burning and ethics scandals, she’s stunningly ignorant and unfit for the vice-presidency. That under a veneer of folksy charm she’s a mean bitch of a woman—though hey, she fits in well with Gramps McCranky there. And her base does appreciate it.
And if McCain does not tone down the contempt, it will simply feed the narrative. Or, if we are really lucky, as someone suggested in another thread, McCain will overcompensate and spend the entire time comically and creepily attempting to make eye contact with Obama (think Al Gore walking across the stage to stand next to Bush, and Bush looking at him as if to think “WTF are you doing?â€).
This should be terrifying for the McCain campaign for two reasons. First, the base will not understand it. To them, a sneering, contemptuous jerk is a feature, not a bug. When they try to tone down McCain, it will turn off the diehards. Look at the reaction of the base to Palin’s RNC speech- they LOVED that she was, for all intents and purposes, nothing but an asshole the entire speech. They loved the “zingers†that were written for her. The rest of the country recoiled in horror, and Obama raised ten million the next 48 hours.
(Emphasis mine, and it’s my favourite line)