PALIN POWER

Posted at 11:42 p.m. ET

We're back now after visiting West Point for the season-closing concert of the U.S. Military Academy Concert Band, and the Jazz Knights.  You haven't lived until you've heard the Concert Band play the "1812 Overture" with live Army cannon providing the effects, and fireworks bursting overhead.    We've gone every year for years, and you never tire of the performance.

Earlier in the evening I was able to listen to part of the John Batchelor Show on ABC radio.  He interviewed Mona Charen and John Fund, who are covering the Republican convention.  Two points from those interviews:

- Sarah Palin has electrified the Republican Party, and money is pouring in.  Even conservative giant James Dobson, who has millions of listeners to his radio program, has now endorsed McCain, an endorsement he'd previously withheld.  Aside from money, the new enthusiasm for the McCain ticket should bring in voters who might have stayed home.  That could translate into important percentage points at the polls.

- Second point.  John Fund articulated what many of us feel when he said that Barack Obama is the most non-transparent and secretive candidate we've had since Richard M. Nixon.  Charles Krauthammer said something similar earlier in the week when he described Obama as "the stranger."  And Fund pointed out what we've been stressing here - that the mainstream media simply will not ask the questions of Obama that it asks others routinely.  He noted that John McCain has released thousands of pages of medical records, but that Barack Obama has released precisely one.

The major network anchors are now rushing to the Gulf Coast to cover the storm.  Not to worry.  Even if they try to avoid the GOP convention, they can't.  McCain is handling the situation with sensitivity and competence, and that may do him more goods than a lot of ribbons and balloons. 

August 31, 2008.