Longtime readers know how cynical I am, so it won’t come as any surprise to them to read that I’m impressed by the immediate, visible impact Sarah Palin has had on the McCain campaign. Jonathan Martin reports:

The Palin effect: crowd size

17,000+ today for the McCain-Palin rally outside of St. Louis, according to a Secret Service magnetometer count provided by the campaign.

As one veteran of Missouri politics said, that’s the sort of crowd usually seen in October for a president — not in August for a candidate.

Call me a simpleton, but that looks like evidence of a bounce.

I am not a fan of John McCain for president (though I am a big John McCain fan). In fact, I find myself leaning toward Obama now. But I do admire McCain’s moxie and his mental toughness, and, purely from a political point of view, his decision to pick Palin.

Noemi Emery laid out the items in the plus column of the decision three days ago (impressive!), and it looks like many of her predictions are coming true—against all odds, since she didn’t take Gustav into account, and even that is figuring to put the GOP at a (relative) advantage: Bush and Cheney won’t be speaking at the convention due to the weather, and yet the worst of the storm happens to be bypassing New Orleans. [Who is stage-managing this show? This dude or dudette is even better than the guys who handled the Beijing Olympics and Obama's acceptance speech performance! ---ed.]

1. Steps on the story of Obama’s speech (and convention), and possibly the bounce coming from them, and wipes them off the news cycle. [ see today's NYT ***---ed.] The Sunday news shows will be all-Palin, all of the time.

2. Sends Republicans into their convention on a huge head of steam. [ Not really, but you can blame Gustav, and/or the media, whichever one is more politically convenient ---ed.]

3. Wipes out the image of McCain as the crotchety elder and brings back that of the fly-boy and gambler, which is much more appealing, and the genuine person. [true dat; see the first paragraph of this post ---ed.]

4. Revs up the base AND excites independents, which no one else in the party, or perhaps in the world, could have accomplished.

5. Puts youth, change, and history on both of the tickets. [yep. I think that's why Obama's fans are so incredibly upset. Palin is, undeniably, an agent of change---both in her actions and her image. She makes Obama less special. Plus: she's fresh meat. We're tired of him. He has used up all his material. She gives us a new character to root for or to deride---or, if you're Andrew Sullivan, to try to ruin. Sorry if you're offended, but that's the way it is in our democracy. It has always been like this. The only difference now is that we're attuned to it. The curtain has been pulled back to reveal fully the behind-the-stage machinations on both sides of the aisle and in the newsrooms of the MSM. The means to report---and to reveal formerly closely held secrets---has been spread to anyone with an internet connection. Likewise, the means to make up lies and spread them instantly across the globe.

And that's as true for Daily Kos diarists as it is for the Russian prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, who is taking advantage of the three-ring circus that is our election cycle to declare a new era, in which Russia has a sphere of influence to compete with America, which isn't so exceptional. Take that! ---ed.]

6. May detach some young people, especially women. [Meghan McCain gave Palin a big endorsement as a "cool role model." ---ed.]

7. May attach some women pissed off about Hillary. [Hmmm. That's complicated. ---ed.]

8. As a pro-life super-achiever, puts feminists in a tizzy.

etc.

Read the whole thing.

Obama built a very impressive organization from the ground up, and created the impression of a pro-Obama movement, which in turn has sparked an interest in politics the likes of which this country (and Europe) hasn’t seen in decades (if the interest of the under-30 crowd around me is any indication … but I have to say that the jury is still out on that, because I live in an unrepresentative bubble in downtown Manhattan and cannot extrapolate much from my immediate surroundings).

McCain, however, seems to have ignited a movement. If indeed he has been mulling over this choice for a long time, you have to tip your hat to his boldness (or recklessness … take your pick). The Republican Party needs a shake-up not only for McCain to have a shot at the White House but in order for the Republicans to have a shot at staying relevant in our fast-moving society.

John Podhoretz hinted at this immediately after McCain picked Palin last Friday:

For the first time this year, there will be some pop-cultural interest in a Republican. Her family story — a conservative Republican with a blue-collar worker of a husband who takes primary responsibility for childrearing with a special-needs baby — is like a dream People Magazine cover.

And indeed, here is People’s immediate coverage.

Podhoretz continued:

Even though her pro-life views will make her anathema to New York City women’s-magazine editors, the possibility of huge newsstand sales in Red State Wal-Marts is just going to be too tempting for them to ignore her or belittle her.

It won’t swing an election, but it’s the kind of thing that can help change the narrative of the election.

It can do more than change the narrative of the election. McCain is confronting the culture war head-on. Suddenly, it’s a little hard to picture rural folk as bitter gun-and religion-clingers now, isn’t it?

Crazy!

A rejuvenation of both brands—Democratic and Republican—would be really healthy for our Republic. Long live the founders!

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*** The Democrats’ best-laid plans for a post-convention honeymoon have been derailed, Jeff Zeleny writes:

The Obama-Biden tour, officially branded “On the Road to Change,” drew far less attention than the campaign had envisioned. Before their plane took off Friday from the Democratic convention in Denver, Senator John McCain dropped the bombshell news that he had chosen Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate. Then, as Hurricane Gustav churned toward the Gulf Coast, Mr. McCain turned up in Mississippi on Sunday.

It’s not a bad idea, and Ross Douthat gets that part:

[N]early every pronouncement from Osama bin Laden or his imitators contains something that might be laughable, if it weren’t in deadly earnest.

There’s the incessant nostalgia for the Crusades, heavy-handed enough to embarrass Sir Walter Scott, and the Risk-board view of geopolitics, epitomized by the oft-cited aspiration to reconquer “Al-Andalus” (known to most of us as “Spain”) for Islam. There’s the blinkered understanding of American politics, as when Bin Laden criticized George H.W. Bush for “installing” his sons as governors of Texas and Florida, and seemed to suggest (depending on the translation) that he might make a separate peace with any American state that didn’t vote for George W. Bush. And of course, there’s the consistency with which Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers greet perceived insults to Islam with threats and actions that seem designed to, well, vindicate the offending parties.

When a Danish newspaper published cartoons portraying Muhammad as an assassin and a terrorist, Islamists responded to these outrageous insinuations by inciting their co-believers to … assassination and terrorism. When the Pope stirred up controversy by suggesting that Islam might be less compatible with reason and philosophy than Christianity, he was answered with a burst of (no doubt rigorously reasoned) acts of violence committed on behalf of the faith he had insulted. Now, just in time with Easter, he’s been answered with al Qaeda’s idea of inter-religious dialogue as well.

But ridiculing this by ridiculing in-earnest and exquisitely effective Nazi propaganda, as Douthat does, seriously misses the mark:

If Hitler’s Germany hadn’t turned Europe into a charnel house, many of the elements of National Socialism — the clumsy anti-Semitic propaganda, the philosophical pretensions, the ranting speeches, even the uniforms — would seem almost deliberately comic, like bits and pieces from a Monty Python sketch.

This could only be written by someone who absorbed the evils of Nazism via pop culture, and who therefore has a limp response to it. He suggests that OBL should go ahead an make Pope Benedict’s day:

Here’s hoping that His Holiness enjoys a quiet chuckle while he puts the Swiss Guards on high alert. There’s nothing wrong with laughing at evil, so long as your bodyguards are packing heat.

Something tells me that the West will need to do a little more than “pack heat” against OBL and those he continues to inspire. But I do salute the effort to look for a handle on OBL that makes the threat he poses accessible to those he is intimidating through his demagoguery.

In other counterterrorism news, today the New York Times writes about the Dutch anti-Islamist provocateur Geert Wilders [e.a.]:

Of the Netherlands’ 16.5 million residents, a million are either Muslim or of Muslim descent. Many of them are so-called guest workers from Morocco, Turkey and other Islamic countries who came here decades ago to work in factories and stayed to raise families of their own.

Occasionally, conflicts arise between mainstream Dutch society — which supports gay marriage and legalized prostitution, for instance — and the often more conservative Muslim minority, and Mr. Wilders has successfully mined the unease between them.

This somehow leaves the impression that Wilders is someone acting for his own (political) benefit. And later on, the Times writer spells out [e.a.]:

Since no one has actually seen Mr. Wilders’s film, some here have started wondering if it is as fake as his hair color, a clever publicity stunt devised to prove his point that Islam and freedom of speech cannot coexist.

Mr. Wilders disabuses him of the notion:

“I get in so much trouble, both privately and politically, that if I would do it for publicity reasons, I would be a fool,” he said.

It’s pretty obvious to me that Wilders is doing it for publicity reasons—that is, to publicize the dangers of Islamist extremism to Western societies.

If that makes him a fool, let there be more such brave “fools.”

Breaking the Waves—an incoherent and sadistic movie—pretty much sealed my interest in the so-called “transgressive”*** back in 1996. Sadism posing as art isn’t my cuppa. Am I surprised to see that the flirtation with sadism continues unabated in 2008? Not really.

Report from Sundance:

Worst Sundance Film: Sex and Self-Mutilation

The worst film …? “Downloading Nancy,” …

Mari [Bello] one of my favorite actresses, plays Nancy. She hires a murderous pen pal on the Internet to come and kill her. (I think it’s because she’s depressed.)

While she’s waiting to be offed by [Jason] Patric, Nancy self-mutilates with a razor blade. She cuts herself all over the place. Not even her shrink, played by “Judging” Amy Brenneman, can talk her out of it. Nancy’s husband, played by British theater star [Rufus] Sewell, has no luck either.

By the time Nancy meets up with Patric’s Louis, she’s cut herself to ribbons and bleeding all over.

Long ago, I stopped wondering why anyone would greenlight such a picture—the reason is obvious: because some insecure idiot, repelled by the movie but compelled by the notion that he might be missing out on the next best thing since Pulp Fiction, said yes. It’s the same instinct that animates the art world and the world of culture: people don’t understand the “new” but don’t want to be thought of as old school, so they go along with a trend, even if it’s repulsive (because they think it’s sophisticated).

I’ve got no argument with the people making these movies. If they can find backers to fund them and actors to star in the movies and film festivals to showcase them and reviewers to write about them and audience members to pay for tickets, I will lay down my life for their right to make their gross-sounding movies.

But I do ask myself who would want to muck around in the darkest of the dark side and spend years of his/her life writing, directing, producing, editing, and acting in such a film. Not my cuppa, either.
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*** I’ve been meaning to write about this for a long time but can never find a moment. In 1996, David Denby published a piece in The New Yorker called “Buried Alive” in which he talks (in retrospect, it looks like a warning) about the effect on our (baby boomers’) children of a pop culture that wallows in the transgressive. Here’s an abstract of his piece.

Also, it’s never a bad occasion to bring back my favorite cultural reference:

Inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s German Expressionist show of the same name, I wrote about Glitter and Doom here and here.

Hey, all you politicos: what have you done for the culture lately?

While some people bitch (and bitch again) about the “neocon agenda” of the New York Times Book Review under its editor Sam Tanenhaus:

bitchin’:

Before the first shot in the Iraq War was fired, its intellectual supporters–future Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus (then a contributing editor at Vanity Fair), New Republic editor Peter Beinart and literary editor Leon Wieseltier; and writers Paul Berman, Richard Brookhiser, David Brooks, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Joe Klein, George Packer and Jacob Weisberg–struck pre-emptively at many who foresaw reruns of the Vietnam War’s trumped-up pretexts, overkill and quagmires.

bitchin’ again:

If Tanenhaus “balances” his criticisms of Bush this evening yet again with diversionary attacks on liberals and the left, many in his AEI audience will be desperately grateful. They still seem to think that assailing war critics or proponents of national health care will confirm them as guardians of national greatness. But they are giving the nation away because they cannot reconcile their keening for a sacred, ordered liberty with their obeisance to every whim of capital.

Tanenhaus himself is leading a book club of the erudite over at the NYT blog Reading Room, about the new translation of War and Peace.

It’s marathon season in New York, and I’m delighted to announce that a panel of limber readers (see their bios in the right column) have agreed to join me in going the distance with Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” all 1200-plus pages in the new translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which we’ll be reading and discussing during the next four weeks.

Why “War and Peace”? Well, it’s one of the greatest novels ever written — the very greatest, some would say. It is, moreover, almost eerie in its timeliness, with its sweeping detailed narrative of military invasion and occupation (by France of Russia in 1812) set against political and social intrigue in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as experienced by aristocratic families, some of them in decline.

“War and Peace” is not just massive. It is sturdily and delicately structured. The novel divides into four volumes (there is also an epilogue). We’ll cover one volume each week — though the panelists will be encouraged to range freely over the whole of the book, its opulent mix of incidents and characters (who include Napoleon and Czar Alexander) and also to tackle Tolstoy’s profound meditations on history, philosophy, religion and human nature.

Here’s the beginning of Bill Keller’s latest entry:

I reached the final page Tuesday morning on a plane home from Des Moines, after a few days of chasing presidential candidates. Squeezing chapters of Volume IV between campaign events, I found the novel bleeding into my observations of the politicians who would be president. John McCain, with his military breeding and his distaste for sugar-coating unpleasant news, reminded me of a voluble Kutuzov. John Edwards, who has lately amped up his populist fervor (as my colleague Jeff Zeleny recounted in Tuesday’s paper) displays definite Denisov tendencies.

It’s interesting, too, to attend a campaign rally fresh from reading Tolstoy’s disquisition on the impotence of humans before history. A lot of Iowa voters — and certainly all of the candidates — seem convinced that choosing a president is choosing a direction in history, that “genius” moves human life in fathomable ways. I could hear Tolstoy tut-tutting from the press section.

I am heartbroken. Our very own Basil Fawlty ***has gone medieval on Anderson Cooper.

Get the gay-baiting details at ETP. Because that’s what this is. Keith Olbermann is a political hack and moral scumbag posing as a moral crusader. He is also a chickenshit. He never invites political opponents to his show to debate them. Instead, he rants and raves from his MSNBC bully pulpit—yes the same network that just got on its high horse about Don Imus. Capus said he got a lot of complaints from inside NBC about Imus’s racism and sexism. Let’s see how many complaints he gets from inside the network about Olbermann’s gay-baiting.

Meanwhile, I’m willing to bet good money that Cooper, who, admittedly is a big fave in my household so I’m waving my Team Cooper colors, is going to come out of this like the effortlessly classy guy he is.
Good breeding still has its merits (GWB notwithstanding). From a 1991 review of Richard Brookhiser’s Way of the WASP:

“The way of the WASP” consists of six closely related values or character traits–conscience, civic-mindedness, industry, success, use, and anti-sensuality. The most important is conscience–”the great legacy of Protestantism.” Conscience is not the modernist way of paradox and ambiguity; “it is the inner light that shows us self-evident truths … the source of whatever freedoms WASP society enjoys.” Civic-mindedness is the “operation of conscience in social relations.” Honor, family, group take a back seat to the good of society. Conscience mandates–and civic-mindedness sanctions–industry, which results in success. By “use,” Brookhiser means asking what things are good for, a kind of practical Aristotelianism. Finally, the WASP suspicion of sensual pleasure is not a morbid turning away from the body, but an application of the test of use: sport, food, even art, are valued because they’re “good for you.” It is the only WASP trait he seems to regret: “The Chinese work hard; so do the Italians. Yet they both know how to cook.”

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*** The last time I fulminated about Olbermann was in this post:

What is most objectionable about Olbermann is that he’s, as Olbermann Watch’s Robert Cox says,

a political hack posing as a journalist and abusing the trust implied in the NBC brand to get out a political message.