The Rudy-and-Sarah Act Goes Down a Storm, But Now the Show's Over

ST. PAUL--For much of Wednesday night, the delegates on the floor of the Republican National Convention had to make the most of the tiny rations of red meat offered to them by the speakers on stage.

They happily chanted “drill baby drill” with former Senate candidate Michael Steele, but few jumped out of their seats. They applauded approvingly at Mike Huckabee’s zinger that Sarah Palin “got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States,” but they seemed a bit mystified with how his long anecdote about school desks connected to John McCain and military service. And Mitt Romney’s liberal-baiting was fun, but it also felt a little nostalgic, and the former Massachusetts governor and political scion didn’t seem the ideal messenger of lines like the following: “For decades, the Washington sun has been rising in the east - Washington has been looking to the eastern elites, to the editorial pages of The Times and The Post, and to the broadcasters from the coast.”

It took Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin to finally give them what they had so hungered for. The New York and Alaska delegations, seated one in front of the other respectively, were primed.

Giuliani went first. Representative Pete King, seated in one of the front rows of the delegation, started snapping pictures as Giuliani walked onto the vinyl black stage bordered, disco-like, by a flashing pink neon light. Giuliani railed against the “left-wing media” and “Hollywood celebrities.” John Faso, who was creamed by Eliot Spitzer in a 2006 race for governor, applauded and then checked his Treo. Giuliani started questioning Barack Obama’s experience and "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature as the screen behind him showed a modest skyline at sunset that some people in the crowd thought was New York. (“Must be somewhere in Alaska,” said Craig Eaton of Brooklyn.) The New Yorkers and everyone else cheered when Giuliani, who has made a new career from his magazine-cover gracing celebrity status as “America’s Mayor,” called Obama “a celebrity senator.”

“American Idol, American Idol,” screamed a Wisconsin delegate seated next to the New Yorkers and behind a man wearing a foam cheese triangle on his head. Giuliani said, “It’s not a personal attack. It’s a statement of fact. He never ran anything, nothing, nada.” Nada cracked the hall up. They started chanting, "Naaada, Naaada, Naaada." “We love you, Rude,” cried out Ruben Estrada, a New York delegate wearing a plastic hat sponsored by Fox News. A Latino member of the delegation predicted that all the reporters were going to come to him to talk to him about the "nada" line. Volunteers squeezed through the aisles passing out homemade signs that said “Hockey Moms 4 Palin" on big pieces of white oak tag. John Harrison, a member of the committee on the arrangements implored delegates not to raise the signs while the former mayor was speaking.

Giuliani was now openly mocking Obama from the stage. “I’m sorry Barack Obama doesn’t feel her hometown is,” he paused, “cosmopolitan enough.” The New York delegation forgot his love of opera and exclusive steakhouses and cigar bars and clapped uproariously. Faso waved a McCain-Palin sign above his head. Joseph Savino, a delegate from the Bronx who flew into Minnesota with Rudy Giuliani on the private plane of supermarket magnate and former Hillary Clinton bundler John Catsimatidis, screamed, “Rudy, Rudy, Rudy!”

The crowd suitably amped, Giuliani left the stage and triumphantly reappeared in the box of honor across from the stage. He received a kiss from his wife, Judith, who called him “incredible,” and gave Huckabee an avuncular tap on the cheek. Below them the Palins sat with Cindy McCain, who wore an emerald green dress and, to demonstrate, literally, the togetherness of the McCain and Palin families, held in her arms Palin’s infant son, Trig, who looked remarkably sedate. To McCain’s left sat Todd Palin, who affected a proud bearing, and then his young daughter Piper, who dug the crust out of her eyes. To her left sat Levi Johnston, the young man who is the expectant father of the child of Bristol Palin, the Alaska governor’s teenage daughter. Johnston, dressed in a blazer and striped boarding school tie, looked as though he hadn’t exhaled the entire night. Bristol, dressed in slimming black, made sure to hold his hand at all times, except when they clapped, so that all the television cameras could see.

When Palin appeared on the stage in her glasses and a-little-bit-up-a-little-bit-down hair, her family rose to their feet. Back on the floor, members of the Alaska delegation jumped on their seats. Nick Stepovich, the Alaska delegation’s whip, waved an Alaska state flag. In the New York delegation, Savino wore the “Hottest Vice President in the Coolest State” button for which he had traded his “Catholics for McCain” button. Behind him, Eaton said “Oh. She’s good. Oh. She’s good,” as she started laying into Obama. “Didn’t I tell ya?” said Savino. “I fall in love for a reason.” When Palin introduced her husband as a champion snowmobile racer, prompting him to jump up from his seat and raise his arm as if he had just won another tournament, the New York delegation pointed at Savino and in unison chanted, “Jealous. Jealous. Jealous.”

Palin spoke and snow-capped mountains appeared on the screen behind her. Then a gushing geyser. She attacked the elite media, and the Alaskans started chanting "NBC, NBC." An NBC sound guy standing next to them, with the network’s trademark peacock on his antennae, froze.

Palin, it turned out, was something of a firebrand. She trashed Obama’s experience, saying he authored two memoirs but no laws, ripped into his perceived presumptuousness, reminding the crowd of the “Greek columns” Obama spoke in front of at Invesco Field in Denver a week earlier. She commanded cheers when she needed cheers. Boos when she wanted boos. After days of doubt surrounding her small-town credentials, her effectiveness as governor, her seriousness and the soap operatic twists and turns of her family, Palin’s aggressive, homespun and competent speech assured the Republicans in the hall.

“Oh man, she hit it out of the park,” said Savino. “I’ve got three hairs left on my head and I was ripping them out.”

Palin was the first prominent Republican messenger to tie together, in one place and time and speech, the entire case that G.O.P. has built piecemeal against Obama over several months. The speech was an articulation of the case against Obama. It was also an effort to immunize Palin against any more media criticism or even inquiry on matters substantive and not. Palin delivered that speech proficiently, maybe even expertly. It was a high point.

In a couple of days, with the convention over, she'll start getting actual questions from reporters and opponents that she actually has to answer. And then America may get to know what Sarah Palin is really made of.