Two liberal women commiserate on a back porch during a cool night on the East Coast. They drink water now, instead of wine, after watching John McCain’s RNC acceptance speech. Two speeches in two nights had caused agonizing living-room protestations. For these women the rousing words of McCain-Palin signified doom for the Obama campaign. Say it ain’t so, it went. Sarah Palin and John McCain had sunk an illusory battleship and one of these women was thinking of a country for self-exile. They were in disbelief that large swaths of the United States could be inspired by Republicans in the wake of George W. Bush. These women had sensed the attractiveness of the speeches.

Thirty-year-old Julia Yach changed her electoral opinion to the Republicans upon Palin’s speech. Inside her home in suburban St. Paul, Minn., Julia’s 16-month-old daughter hangs on her leg while she talks on the phone, leaving her on occasion to pull books off a wooden shelf. Julia has two children, and works forty-hours a week as a communications manager in the furniture warranty industry. It’s an American company proud that it doesn’t outsource their call center, instead sending its calls to a small town in South Dakota. “If they don’t work in the gas station or the cheese factory, they work for us,” she says. She and her husband have two cars and their home is not at risk of foreclosure. Still, a vacation is not being planned any time soon.

The night before, she says, Sarah Palin’s speech had officially made her a swing voter, from Barack Obama to McCain-Palin. “I was so thinking that the Republican ticket sucked … and was almost relieved that there was somebody out there that could excite” the people, she says.

It was abortion and Palin’s tough words. Yach was impressed by Palin’s confidence and the strength with which she carried herself in the face of media scrutiny about her family. It’s not that Obama’s position was bad, to prevent teen pregnancies any step of the way, she says, it’s that Palin’s position was good.

The speech was also smug, Julia says, and maybe a bit overconfident. But that was OK.

Eight hours of prairie-driving away in Pierre, South Dakota, Julia’s mother, Carolyn Guhin, regrets not having watched the DNC convention. She is supporting Obama, but has yet to hear him speak.

An in-law celebrates the choice 1500 miles away. For Carolyn, a daughter of a schoolteacher and a car salesman from small-town Iowa, the Democratic Party has always been the public servants and the supporters of social justice. The Republicans were the fat cats. But Carolyn is against laws legalizing abortion, and she presents a profoundly complex viewpoint.

“I was trying not to think of the election … until Palin,” says Guhin.

A Catholic schoolteacher for whom the thought of hearing McCain speak this night “just gags me,” Palin’s speech had “fired her up” out of a slumber of general inattention to the campaign.

Palin came across like “the popular girl running for high school senate,” says Carolyn. “It was shocking how confident she was.”

Was it the tone, the aggression or the way of slipping in backhanded cuts on Obama that made it seem like this? Palin made comments that one had a sense were untrue, but seemed plausible, and totally indefensible in the moment.

Back in the Arizona delegation hotel in St. Paul, sometime between a delegate group photo and a delegate reception with a financial institution, Laura French, a 34-year-old alternate delegate, declares by phone that she “fell in love” with Palin and her speech, and was excited to embrace her as their new leader. At times French wears a “Unidos por McCain” button. After Republican primaries that were “divisive and anti-immigrant,” McCain’s July declaration at a luncheon for the National Council of La Raza (a Latino advocacy group) that immigrants were “children of God” as he repeated in his nomination speech, resonated deeply with French.

These reverberations are what Stephan Strothe, the chief correspondent for the Washington bureau of the German news channel N24 News, tries to convey to a German populace mystified by the popularity of the Republicans and blinded by adulation for Obama. A little more than a month ago, 200,000 Germans congregated to hear Obama speak at the Victory Plaza in Berlin.

At midday Strothe opens the blinds to his hotel room after live broadcasting through the Mid-Western night and the German early morning (4-8 a.m.). Bedtime was 5:00 a.m. Central time.

“(Germans) have a hard time understanding what has happened in the last eight years,” including the “false premises” for war and the state of the economy. It is not clear to them yet “how this can be a close race,” he says.

For Germans and the women on the porch, Obama should be the guaranteed winner.

Strothe is just trying to explain this different process to his viewers. The United States political process is highlighted by, “banalities and how the candidates wave the flag,” he says. “If all else fails you have delegates chanting USA, USA. That is totally foreign to my audience in Germany. We have to explain how the decisions are being made here.”

If only it were so simple.

Originally published at Takingbackpolitics.com

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