Sarah Palin, Boadicea of the backwoods

Sarah Palin gave what one could politely call a passable speech at the Republican convention in St Paul last night, but it's a measure of how desperate both the delegates and the press have been for excitement that they hailed it as 45 minutes worth of consummate rhetorical savagery establishing Governor Palin as a star and leaving the Democratic ticket bloodied by her quips and insults.

Listening to the speeches preceding Palin's one could see the depths of the Republican dilemma and why John McCain made his long-odds gambler's pick of Palin last week, in the immediate aftermath of Obama's triumphant final evening in Denver.

Up to the microphone stepped McCain's erstwhile rivals – Romney, Huckabee and Giuliani – and, aside from ritual homage to the heroism of John McCain, they found

nothing better to do with their time than flail away at Big Government and the liberals in the national press corps.

There's a problem here, of course, which is that Big Government in Washington has been run by the Bush White House for the last eight years, and by a Republican Congress for six of these eight, and by the US Supreme Court, of whom all but two justices were appointed by Republican presidents. Attacks on the elite pinko press always go down well with the rubes but don't really furnish the high-octane fuel necessary to send McCain surging past Obama.

A week ago McCain made the assessment that the Republican Party's Christian base didn't trust him and the Undecideds saw him as just the sort of Washington insider Romney and others were scheduled to deride in St Paul. On the spur of the moment he bet on Palin and tossed a new soap opera into the fall schedule.

Sarah Palin is part of a frontier myth that goes back to the earliest years of the Republic: the beautiful, intrepid