I’m feeling better and better about this November.

I was in the Press Pit at yesterday’s Bachmann/Palin rally at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

I’ll say this about the GOP; there was a time when most of the great speakers were Democrats; Ronald Reagan was something of an anamaly (and a few steps beyond being just a great stump speaker).

Ever watched video of a World War II airplane engine starting up?  The propeller starts to spin, as the starter cranks the engine over.  You know it’s spinning, as the spark plugs start to fire and you hear a few cylinders coughing, but you wonder when the airplane is going to take off.  And then, suddenly, it catches – and the propeller smoothly speeds up, and the engine takes on that hearty roar that catches you in the pit of your gut, and you just know that someone’s gonna get a bomb dropped on them.

That’s what watching Michele Bachmann speaking is like.  When she gets to the podium, you can tell she’s a ball of potential energy waiting to explode; she speaks without notes, and I suspect she goes onstage with a few ideas of where she wants things to go, and tries a few of them…

…and, imperceptibly, as the crowd warms up and as she, like that engine in the B17, catches on, suddenly she and the whole room just take off, and the plane lifts off the runway, you just know that a bunch of Sixth District liberals and sanctimonious state Dems and the national media are going to be dodging explosions the rest of the day.

And Sarah Palin?  When you hear the woman talk, you can see why the national Democrats and media (pardon the usual redundancy) have had to switch to full-time defamation mode, attacking her education, her family, her baby, her hobbies, her looks (and occasionally her term in office, although less-often substantively than, say, by filing and referencing disposable “ethics” complaints (attacks that Palin disposed of with grace and sharp, pointed humor – which is hard to see coming from most of her thud-witted competition).  If they had to take her on on the force of her personality and the power of her speaking, they’d be a third party. She spoke for about twenty minutes; while I compared Bachmann to a Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engine, Palin is more like a heat-seaking missile; she rocketed right off the rail toward her target.

Neither of them needed a teleprompter, by the way.

As to content?  Both of ’em borrowed from Reagan, addressing the character of the American people when challenged; the obvious subtext is, “we’re being challenged now”.

As to the crowd?  They said 11,000 tickets had been given away, including 1,000 at the door.  I stood up on my seat in the press pen – there were maybe 1,000 bleacher and floor seats, and the rest was standing room, and the place (Hall D at the Convention Center) was as packed as a good mosh pit.

Afterward, I wandered ovdr to the Hyatt, to see if there was any visible sign of the Dems’ purported counter-rally.

Other than a few black-clad hypstrz, I didn’t see a thing.  Not that I wanted to walk into the Hyatt to find out; I was feeling too good.

More later.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 7:25 am and is filed under Campaign '10, Conservatism, Minnesota Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.