the kicker

Cleverer smears, please

An otherwise charming Pat Healy piece on Palin’s rhetorical style and campaign gets a little detail wrong: “Man, I love small-town U.S.A.,” Ms. Palin told several...
October 14, 2008

An otherwise charming Pat Healy piece on Palin’s rhetorical style and campaign gets a little detail wrong:

“Man, I love small-town U.S.A.,” Ms. Palin told several thousand people on a field in Ohio, “and I don’t care what anyone else says about small-town U.S.A. You guys, you just get it.”

Ms. Palin did not identify who “anyone else” was. But listening to her campaign speeches three weeks before the presidential election, an informed voter would not need two chances to guess between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain. (The posters reading “Barack Bin Lyin” at the McCain-Palin rally in Virginia Beach might be a hint, too.)

Healy isn’t giving enough credit to these sign-wielding sophisticated satirists. Unless he saw a different sign, their slogan was much, much, more clever. You see it was based on three rhyming words, not just two!






(AFP photo via The Politico‘s Jonathan Martin)

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Clint Hendler is the managing editor of Mother Jones, and a former deputy editor of CJR.