The Man Behind Palin's Speech

By Massimo Calabresi / Washington
Time

As Democrats and Barack Obama's campaign scrambled to attack Sarah Palin's well-received acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., on Wednesday night, they latched on early and hard to the fact that it was penned by former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully. But the story is more complicated than just the recycling of a Bush staffer into John McCain's fold, and it tells you more about how McCain's camp intends to use Palin than it does about the continuing influence of the current White House.

The clues are in the text itself. Scully started working on the vice-presidential speech a week ago, before he or anyone else knew who the nominee would be, and it's not hard to pick out the parts that would have been the same regardless of who delivered it. Scully unspooled two centrist themes via Palin that have been key to the McCain message: the idea that the Republican nominee puts service to country ahead of career and the notion that he's the true representative of Middle America. Both themes implicitly push Obama and Biden to the left, and Scully made them explicit with lines accusing the Democrats of élitism and talking down to working-class voters.

Once Palin was chosen, Scully tailored the speech to the Alaska governor, highlighting her biography and using her PTA background and local political experience (contrasted so memorably with Obama's work as a community organizer) to bolster his two themes. Where much media attention in the wake of her surprise naming has focused on Palin's views on cultural issues like abortion, the speech carefully steered away from ideological touchstones. Palin was shown as an average mainstream American looking to bring change to Washington, further bolstering McCain's overarching message of reforming the wasteful Federal Government.

(Continued here.)