Even With Gustav, It's All About Sarah Palin For Political Media

Until Gustav began heading toward the Gulf Coast, there was one topic of conversation among the media who have arrived here in St. Paul for the start of the Republican National Convention:  Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

John McCain’s choice for his running mate so startled the national press corps (not to mention one of his closest advisers, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who was strongly promoting his pal Sen. Joe Lieberman for the post), that Palin was not just the top subject of conversation, she was the ONLY subject.

On Saturday night, I attend a “salon dinner” hosted by Microsoft and The Atlantic that featured media insiders and politicos at the Minneapolis Club in downtown Minneapolis.

The carefully crafted guest list of about 30 included both Minnesota senators (Democrat Amy Klobuchar and Republican Norm Coleman) as well as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, NBC News correspondent-at-large Luke Russert (left with public television’s Judy Woodruff), Woodruff's husband Al Hunt of Bloomberg, political newsletter editor Charlie Cook, New York Times columnist David Brooks, journalist Ron Brownstein, McCain’s chief of staff Mark Buse, RNC chair Mike Duncan, “Meet the Press” executive director Betsy Fisher, “All Things Considered” host Michele Norris,  and NBC political director Chuck Todd, among others.

Private conversations were banned at the dinner. Instead, James Bennet, editor of The Atlantic, moderated a one-speaker-at-a-time conversation, no small task given the guest list of folks accustomed to making their views known just about wherever and whenever they wish.

Bennett succeeded, and while a second ground rule was that the evening was to be off the record, I can tell you that one-hour and 50-minutes of the two hours concerned Palin. And suffice it to say that the sense of the table among media types might be described as “bewildered,” while McCain confidant Graham did yeoman service defending the selection of the neophyte governor.

I’ll leave it to the political bloggers and columnists to weigh in on Palin’s prospects and credentials. But I can tell you skepticism reigns among the Washington chattering class. At a one o’clock brunch hosted by General Motors at the hip, Minneapolis art-hotel, Chambers, I drifted past clumps of journalists and politicos sipping Bloody Marys. Without fail, almost all the snippets of conversation were about Palin, even as convention organizers were meeting to turn the direction of the Republican convention around from a celebration to a hurricane watch.

You can bet that when the Republicans and the media fly home from the Twin Cities at the end of this week, and when the news of Gustav begins to subside, Sarah Palin is going to come in for a very close inspection.