The British press, like their American cousins, doesn’t seem to able to get enough of Sarah Palin.
The self-described hunting, shooting and hockey “mom” is the “biggest hot-button political story in the English-speaking world”, says Martin Kettle in The Guardian on Friday.
Newspapers have devoted pages to the previously little-known governor of Alaska and now Republican vice-presidential candidate.
But while she was described as the next Margaret Thatcher by the American media in the Daily Telegraph, the British media have concentrated on drawing parallels with psychiatrist Dr Melfi from “The Sopranos” TV show or the late Princess Diana.
“She joins those women, such as Diana, Princess of Wales and Carla Bruni, who were picked to fill a gap at the side of a prominent man and promptly upstaged him,” writes Bronwen Maddox in The Times.
Her colleague Andrew Billen draws on Palin’s joke for inspiration: what is the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull — lipstick.
“It has been applied liberally to Mrs Palin’s pleasing face, less hockey mom than Dr Melfi from The Sopranos or the Specsavers model, a sexy lady who knows it but won’t show it. Her hair was down but her neckline was up.”
But all the papers agree she was a superstar. Suzanne Goldenberg in The Guardian writes that Palin had “provided excitement and glamour to a campaign that formerly had trouble electrifying the Republican base”.
She can connect with people in white working-class small towns and conservative areas, as well as younger voters and working mothers, Goldenberg adds.
“Hers was the sort of speech that George Bush, at his best, could do with great effect,” Kettle says.
Peter McKay in the Daily Mail goes one further and says she shouldn’t just set her cap at becoming vice-president.
“The story now isn’t about Sarah Palin’s suitability as vice-president. It’s the certainty that, if McCain, 72, wins, he’ll serve only one term. And his party will be grooming her as America’s first woman President.”
And all that despite her grating voice. “You could kill a bear at 200 yards with Sarah Palin’s voice,” Maddox cruelly says in The Times.
“I heard it first on the radio and winced; an octave higher than Hillary Clinton’s. It made a screech out of ‘I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country’.”
Palin as President would be bad news for The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Clover though. He writes in his Earthlog that she “could yet be a disaster for international relations” and that “environmentalists detest her”, quoting her pro-drillers stance and hunting habit.
She is not popular with Philip Stephens in the Financial Times either. Her speech was “not as good as the gush suggested”, he writes.
British newspapers were not fooled either by the “potent mixture of the homely and the daring”.
“Her teeth had not only been whitened, but sharpened, the better to sink into Barack Obama,” Billen in the Times writes.
Maddox describes Palin’s overall effect as “bullying”.
“You would not want to be on the Parent Teacher Association with her,” she observes.
“Her sarcasm was plain nasty. Mrs Palin portrays herself as the innocent outsider but she is a very worldly queen of her domain.”
The Guardian’s Kettle writes: “Palin can certainly attack. But will either male or female voters want a long-term relationship with a political dominatrix from the Arctic?”
Kettle warns against pumping up Palin’s profile too much.
He says the media had initially underestimated her, but the danger after her barnstorming speech on Wednesday is that it will now overestimate her.
“This isn’t a movie. This isn’t Geena Davis in Commander in Chief. It isn’t Jane Horrocks in The Amazing Mrs Pritchard.”
“Palin is one important factor among several in this election, and the real challenge, especially here in the eye of the storm, is get her into some perspective.”
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