NP: Elbow, The Seldom Seen Kid

I didn't watch Sarah Palin's speech last night. I had been watching Rudy Giuliani, up until he said "September 11th," which meant I had to drink. I didn't have any beer in the house, so that meant going down to my local pub, where they were showing the Cubs losing their fifth game in a row.

My only first-person reaction was when I saw the leak of the line talking smack about community organizing. Let me be clear about this. Sarah Palin wouldn't last fifteen minutes on the South Side of Chicago. And I say that having seen the picture of her with the rifle.

So, anyway, I've been mostly going through blog reactions and looking for interesting arguments. Most of the pro- arguments are not all that interesting, in that they all seem somewhat unified in their use of talking points. On the other side, you've got this interesting point from Nate Silver:

The fact remains that Barack Obama is extremely well known and Palin is largely unknown, and when that is the case, your perception of the known commodity is more likely to influence your perception of the unknown commodity than the other way around. If there's a certain Italian restaurant that you've been going to for years, and some stranger stops you on the street and tells you that they don't know how to cook their pasta, you're going to think that the stranger is a kook -- not that the restaurant is poor.

And not only is Barack Obama exceptionally well known, but perceptions of him are exceptionally well entrenched. In today's Rasmussen numbers, 63 percent of voters had either a very favorable or a very unfavorable perception of Obama. This is an extremely high figure. I looked up the Rasmussen numbers for other prominent politicians, and this number was the highest I could find ... actually tied with Bill Clinton for the highest:

That last bit is intriguing, but if you know me, you know that I would think that. Steve Benen goes with the base vs. swing voters issue:

Palin inspired hard-core conservatives when she needed to persuade everyone else. To that extent, last night's speech was a missed opportunity, if not an outright mistake.

I don't know that we know how the speech played with the common, undecided folk, although several blogs cited a couple of focus groups in Michigan and New Mexico that didn't bode terribly well for the GOP. But it's been pointed out a lot lately that self-identified Democrats outnumber self-identified Republicans these days, so firing up your base only gets you so far.