Willie Brown has been a lot of things in California politics, including mayor of San Francisco; Speaker of the Assembly (the lower house of the state legislature). He is an unabashed liberal, having sponsored the bill to legalize homosexuality in 1975. (Yes, hard as it may be to believe, homosexual sex used to be a felony in California.)
He's a very cunning politician. When a number of his colleagues were taking bribes from undercover FBI agents, he was smart enough to recognize that such overt bribery was illegal, or at least not what it seemed to be, and returned the envelopes stuffed with cash to the agents.
So this column by Willie Brown in the September 7, 2008 San Francisco Chronicle is quite astonishing:
The Democrats are in trouble. Sarah Palin has totally changed the dynamics of this campaign.
Period.
Palin's speech to the GOP National Convention on Wednesday has set it up so that the Republicans are now on offense and Democrats are on defense. And we don't do well on defense.
Suddenly, Palin and John McCain are the mavericks and Barack Obama and Joe Biden are the status quo, in a year when you don't want to be seen as defending the status quo.
From taxes to oil drilling, Democrats are now going to have to start explaining their positions.
Whenever you start having to explain things, you're on defense.
I actually went back and watched Palin's speech a second time. I didn't go to sleep until 1:30 a.m. I had to make sure I got the lines right.
Her timing was exquisite. She didn't linger with applause, but instead launched into line after line of attack, slipping the knives in with every smile and joke.
And she delivered it like she was just BS-ing on the street with the meter maid.
She didn't have to prove she was "of the people." She really is the people.
There is one thing she should have done: announced when her 17-year-old daughter and the teenage father of the girl's unborn child are getting married and invited all of us to the wedding. It should be like Sunday at church.
As for Palin herself, she is going to be very, very effective on the campaign trail, especially if McCain's people can figure out how to gently keep her from getting into confrontations with the press.
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