Palin's moment: Frum on "Game Change"

By luck or by some deep political instinct, Palin launched her attack on the credentialed urban elite at exactly the hour that this elite was discrediting itself as at no time since the urban crisis of the 1960s.

It was the mighty brains of Wall Street who first enabled the financial crisis—and then escaped scot-free from the disaster, even as ordinary Americans lost their jobs, homes, and savings. Palin was speaking to and for constituencies who had steadily lost ground through the previous decade—and who now confronted personal and national disaster. Meanwhile, the people asking for bailouts—and the people deciding whether to grant bailouts—boasted résumés that looked a lot like Obama’s private school/Columbia/Harvard Law School pedigree. That is, when they weren’t outright Obama supporters and donors.

And at the same time, the position of America in the world—and of the white majority within America—seemed in question as never before. There, too, Obama could be made to represent every frightening trend: the flow of immigrants (12 million of them between 2000 and 2008, half of them illegal); the rise of non-Western powers like China and India; the deadly threat of terrorism emanating from people with names like “Barack,” “Hussein,” and—give or take a consonant—“Obama.”

Game Change shows Palin gleefully exciting all these fears—and a dismayed McCain overwhelmed by them. “Who is the real Barack Obama?” McCain, as played by Ed Harris, asks a campaign crowd. “A terrorist,” shouts a man in a red gimme cap. Later, other voices from the crowd shout in reply to that same question: “A Muslim! A socialist! He hangs out with people who hate our country! Kill him! Send him back to Africa!” McCain recoils—but Palin is shown leading angry crowds in chants of “U.S.A., U.S.A.”

“This is not the campaign I wanted to run,” Harris’s McCain wistfully laments. But it’s too late.

The professionals soon discover their mistake. “I don’t even like to say this, but has it occurred to you guys that she might be mentally unstable?” asks one staffer about the woman the McCain campaign proposed to put next in line to America’s nuclear codes. As they come to know Palin, the campaign professionals begin to feel an awakening of conscience: first qualms, then fears, and finally revulsion—not for the campaign, not for their careers, but for their country. They supported McCain because they saw him, in Schmidt’s words, as a statesman and national hero running against a celebrity with no major life accomplishments. In hopes of reversing adverse poll numbers, they yoked a great man to a running mate who was not merely unworthy, but dangerous.

Some of the best acting in the film is in the looks of unspoken dread that flit about the faces of Sarah Paulson’s Wallace and Harrelson’s Schmidt as they react to Palin’s wilder and wilder provocations. What have they done? And if this campaign somehow wins—and Palin is put within reach of the presidency—what might they have done?

In the end, Wallace confesses she could not bring herself to vote for the ticket—and Schmidt is left to wrestle with his conscience before the 60 Minutes cameras, gallantly casting aside all self-excuse and self-deception. “You don’t get do-overs in life,” he says in the anguished voice of a man who wished one did.