THE PALIN EFFECT

THE PALIN EFFECT
For the most part, my personal political points of view (note the plural) have not been expressed in this blog. Like most of the folks in my clan, I am highly opinionated, but eclectic on the major social-political-economic issues that are so hotly and mindlessly churned in the various infotainment media. What follows is not a paid or unpaid political advertisement.
Unless you have been lost in a remote and uninhabited portion of the planet for last couple of months, you must be aware of two meteorological phenomena that have dominated headlines (for those few who still read print media), web blogs (for those that read pixels) and leads to the various and incessant talking head programs (for those that don’t read at all). One is the string of hurricanes – Gustav, Hanna, Ike and Josephine – marching through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico – and the Chinook from the Arctic known as the Palin effect that has turbocharged the McCain-Campaign.
On September 6 and 7, the remnants of Hanna drenched the Washington, DC metropolitan area. On September 8 – a rare sunny but moderately cool day – the Palin effect swept into Fairfax County, just across the Potomac, and turned out a record shattering crowd of 23,000 red shirted supporters.
I wanted to observe, first hand, the Palin effect. My day began, as usual, at 5:00 a.m. in a tree covered northwest section of Washington, D.C. less than a quarter mile from Rock Creek Park. Rock Creek Park flows from second base (DC looks like a baseball diamond) to the west of the pitcher’s mound (Capitol Hill and various monuments) until it flows into the Potomac. Home base is Arlington National Cemetery. Rock Creek Park also serves as a wildlife superhighway (although it was not invented by Al Gore) bringing an abundance of deer, fox, squirrels and other critters into the neighborhood. Frequently, between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m., military helicopters fly over headed to or from disclosed and undisclosed locations with various executive level officers aboard. All of this activity often spices-up the morning walk with our two Australian shepherds.
On Palin day, I drove first to Dulles Airport in northern Virginia to pick up an equally adventurous cousin who was arriving by red-eye from Los Angeles. My cousin had agreed to drop in on the Palin-McCain Rally on the way back into the city. The rally organizers recommended that all participants wear something red to visually reinforce the rally theme – Keep Virginia Red (Republican). Serendipitously, my cousin has a deep loyalty for the Anaheim Angels, so I took along the Angels baseball cap from my last visit to the west coast and Angels stadium (Angels 7, BoSox 4!).
By e-mail late the day before, the McCain Campaign sent an alert changing the venue from a high school auditorium (capacity 6,000) to a nearby city park (capacity 30,000). The media buzzed, first that Obama supporters had objected to the rally in a public school, even though Obama had used several such venues in Virginia during the primary season, and then that the McCain Campaign had voluntarily withdrawn because the auditorium could not accommodate the anticipated crowd.
Our instructions told us to park in a shopping mall across from the high school where buses would then take us to the nearby park. We got to the mall at 8:30, about half an hour after the buses started ferrying supporters to the park. About 200 people were ahead of us; within 15 minutes about 500 people were lined up behind us. We then learned that similar bussing operations were underway from other satellite parking lots.
By 9:00 a.m. we were on board and underway to the park, about 3.5 miles from the mall. The crowd was lively, talkative and about 60 percent female, aged 9 months to 90 years. There were many noticeable 3 and 4-generation clusters.
Our bus rolled up to the park and then kept on going as we looked out on a line extending from the park entrance for about a half-mile. The bus stopped, we filed out and then walked up a side street looking for the end of the line. Another half-mile and we found it!
The line moved steadily forward as new bus arrivals continued to stream past us in the other direction looking for the new end of the line. One of the new arrivals – a woman in her 80’s – fell while walking down the sloping street. After helping her up, the line spontaneously and collectively decided that she need go no further toward the end, but should instead join the forward moving ranks. I was privileged to be her escort.
She seemed a bit unsteady from the fall, so I asked her, “Who are you going to vote for?” She immediately brightened, got the joke and said strongly and emphatically, “Palin and McCain!” in that order. Cheers from the crowd.
It turns out that Shirley had survived both cancer and a stroke, so she was not even a little bit daunted by the long walk or the trip from Richmond that morning (about 100 miles south of Fairfax) to get to the rally. Looking around the crowd, I think I saw the same excited and steely determination among the rest of the marching sisters of Sarah Palin. This was a remarkably tough, capable and well organized cadre of grandmothers, mothers and daughters from church groups, PTAs, medical offices, small businesses, executive suites and every other walk of working, professional and domestic life.
Just before 11:00 a.m., when the introductions were to begin, we finally filed into an already crowded outdoor amphitheater. Several prominent democrats and former supporters of Hillary Clinton told the crowd why they were now backing McCain-Palin, as the excitement and anticipation continued to grow. Finally, former Senator and candidate Fred Thompson took the microphone to introduce Palin who would then speak and introduce McCain. No one of the 23,000 or so present was sitting down, both because there was no room to sit down and because no one wanted to sit down.
I will not go into the speeches. If you saw the conventions or any of the reports, you already know the applause lines. This is about the “Palin Effect,” not about Sarah Palin herself or even her political views.
When the speeches and chanting ceased, this very orderly crowd moved slowly through the funnel created by the narrow exits, still chattering, excited and energetic after four hours (not counting travel time or the bus trip) they had spent that morning to hear a self-proclaimed hockey mom speak for 15 minutes. When we finally poured out of the enclosure and onto the four-lane road where the busses were parked, about 75% of the crowd decided to walk the 3.5 miles back to the mall – Baby Bjorns and baby strollers, mothers and fathers and an awesome number of daughters.
Luckily, the Fairfax Police station happened to be right next to the park. They immediately turned one of the lanes going away from the park toward the mall into a very wide walkway. The river of red shirts and placards (“We Love You Sarah”, “Drill, Baby, Drill”, etc.) flowed out toward Main Street and past isolated clusters of forlorn looking Obama acolytes.
When we turned the corner onto Main, traffic was backed up as far as we could see, the 3.5 miles (my cousin had a pedometer) to the parking mall and beyond. The drivers of the idling cars, for the most part, seemed to be enjoying the spectacle and many were actively participating in it, mostly supporters but also some mostly good-natured folks from the other side.
And the rally kept going in the mall! The McDonalds that we filed into for something to drink was wall-to-all in red shirted people. You could tell from their conversations, they did not know each other, but had probably learned how to network at an age even before they knew what the term meant. If the Palin effect takes hold, we will see very soon how it will spread.