By the time Election Day rolls around, if she and McCain have been smart, Sarah will have been seen flirting with Steelers hero Big Ben Roethlisberger, skating arm-and-arm with Pens superstar Sidney Crosby and shooting holes through Osama bin Laden targets at local rifle ranges.
Obamaphiles, Hillary loyalists and public school teachers won’t fall for the Republicans' blessed mother. Neither will staunch libertarians, who realize she still is a loyal member of the GOP no matter how much she dislikes earmarks and reveres the Second Amendment.
But local women of a moderate-to-conservative bent who are balancing kids and jobs love Palin because she looks, talks and acts like one of them.
Local men aren't so complicated. They swoon over Sarah because she’s a looker and they are lookists, it’s true. But it’s also because she’s nothing like hard Hillary Clinton. Sarah is nice, normal, unaffected. Plus, they really like girls who like sports and guns.
OK, so maybe Sen. Obama still has a slim chance to take Pennsylvania. Like all Democrats running statewide, he can count on Philadelphia City/County to automatically produce the 300,000- or 400,000-vote margin he needs to overcome the Republicans who dominate the state's empty “T” counties.
Maybe the turnout in Philly and its liberal suburbs will save Obama. But in Western Pennsylvania, Sarah Palin has clearly grabbed the home-field advantage.
Bill Steigerwald
Bill Steigerwald, born and raised in Pittsburgh, is a former L.A. Times copy editor and free-lancer who also worked as a docudrama researcher for CBS-TV in Hollywood before becoming a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a columnist Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Bill Steigerwald recently retired from daily newspaper journalism..
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