“Any dirt on her?” a reporter asked Debbie from Wasilla, calling in to Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio show.  D. is a process server and provides copies of court files to anyone who asks (and pays a “not cheap” fee).  She’s getting lots of calls from Obama camp — oops, no, not them — from mainstream media reporters including from Wash Post and LA Times, looking for files that in any way relate to Sarah Palin, taking their cue from Natl Enquirer’s “Sarah Palin — WHAT SHE’S HIDING.” 

Nothiing of substance in this one, she had told the one explicitly looking for dirt.  Big seller is the friend’s sealed divorce file, which has tax returns and contact info for the husband, as in the Enquirer.  He sealed them for privacy’s sake, says Debby; now they’re unsealed and a hot item for newsies, who have shown little or no interest in Obama’s Chicago Annenberg Challenge files.

They are after her. 

Listen in.

[Hat tip, as we bloggers say, to The Next Right]

Look at the last numbers here, in which the light green swings up, the dark swings down:

I used to like dark green (the color, St. Patrick’s Day style), but that light green (the color) is my shade these days.  Go McC-P!

Sarah Palin the target:

“Democrats dare not issue [Sarah] Palin a pass — she’s too dangerous a foe. Normally vice presidential candidates fade into the background. Nobody is expecting that with Palin; indeed, her newfound celebrity has made even Obama look dull. [Italics added]

The usual rule is that voters don’t trust attacks from people they don’t know, but Palin is turning the adage on its head. Democrats are determined to attack her credibility, even if it gives her more visibility. ‘We’ve got to go after her, and fast,’ a top Democratic strategist, who asked for anonymity when discussing strategy, told me”

That’s Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, in the latest issue.

In post-speech comments, one of the non-Fox cable stations had full-bore analysis of whom Palin was aiming for with all those small-town-culture references, as if demographics were her concern.  They don’t get it, do they? 

It’s the culture part, stupid, where traditional values hold forth, not only in small towns but in big-city neighborhoods.  Or they get it but resist it, because it gets right at something they won’t admit — how far removed they are from the American Majority.

Drill, drill, drill, says the lady Veep (to be?), in this CNBC interview “days before” McC picked her, in which she notes that Biden voted against the trans-Alaska pipeline 30 years ago (about halfway thru interview) and calls him and Obama “naive” in saying or implying that “renewable” alternate energy supplies can make a short-term difference.

I think the O-B campaign should pay close attention to this interview, which reminded me of the champ’s handlers urging him to pay attention to the TV shot of challenger Rocky pounding at a frozen meat carcass in a packing-plant icebox. 

“You’re breakin’ the ribs. You do that to Apollo Creed, they’ll put us in jail for murder,”

his friend Paulie told him.

The overconfident Apollo ignored them, to his hurt.

Quibble here: Palin is sharp and quick and cogent in reply (to admittedly sympathetic interviewer) but might consider her reference to our being “in a world of hurt” if such and such happens as one to be tightly rationed in interviews and in the Coming Debate — once per interview is enough.

Later:  Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Jack Kelly, who promoted Palin in June, looks ahead to her campaigning:

if I were Joe Biden, I’d be worried. A former journalist, Sarah Palin is careful about what she says and says it well, qualities for which Mr. Biden is not renowned. Mr. Obama picked Mr. Biden in part because of his reputed skill as a hatchet man. But if Mr. Biden comes on too hard in the vice presidential debate, he’ll look like a bully. And Alaska is littered with the bodies of those who tried to bully Sarah Palin and failed.

Do we cast Obama as Apollo Creed?

On the other hand O-Creed has his influential friends, says Palin and media skeptic Scott at PowerLine Blog:

The experience question — implicit in Kelly’s concern about Palin’s campaign performance — remains a kind of trap door on her candidacy. Obama’s endless parade of ignorant gaffes are walled off by a bodyguard of media fans. Governor Palin will have no such margin for error.

In other words, like the tree falling in the forest primeval, will voters not hear of O– and B-gaffes?  Or will they hear of P-ripostes that hit the mark?  Put another way, what have we heard more of, O’s Rezko house or McC’s seven?

In Alaska, Sarah Palin shot down her homegrown “good old boy network”:

[She] put her political career on the line by challenging the corrupt, old Alaskan Republican bulls on their sleazy pay-for-play politics and their use of the public trust to fill the pockets of their friends.

That’s John Kass today.

She didn’t merely talk about abstract change in Washington. She challenged corruption at home, challenged her own party bosses—some of whom are already in prison—at great risk to her political future.

Change we can believe in where all politics is located, according to Boston pol Tip O’Neill.

It is something I’ve begged and begged Obama to do with the ham-fisted pols in Chicago and Illinois—to not merely talk about change far away, but to take a principled stand even if that stand runs counter to his political interests at home; to challenge the thugs [italics added] of his own party, to give us a reason to believe he’s the man he says he is. He has politely declined.

Of course he has.  He owes everything to Chicago’s ham-fisted pols, with whom he has played ball into extra innings, with more to come.

Can you imagine what’s in it for connected people in Chicago for O. to win?  The corruption prosecutions that will fall by the wayside?  The prosecutor Fitzgerald who will be reassigned?  The contracts that will dry up?  The entire sense of ease and comfort that comes from having one-of-us in the White House?

And by the way, we had another Fitzgerald, another senator, did we not, who went after ham-fisted pols in Illinois — Sen. Peter, who also laid his career on line, settling for one term after giving them fits, if you’ll pardon the (I swear) accidental pun.