Palin rallies crowd in Richmond

RICHMOND — Vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin dashed into the conservative heartland the state on Monday, likening the struggling Republican ticket to a stock-car racer revved for a come-from-behind victory.

Standing on sun-baked stage on a dusty field on the edge of Richmond International Raceway, Palin referred to Jimmie Johnson’s squeaker win last month in the Chevy Rock & Roll 400 at the sprawling NASCAR complex in Henrico County.

Dismissing polls that show her and presidential nominee John McCain trailing nationally — and in traditionally Republican Virginia — Palin said, “It’s looking a lot like that Rock & Roll 400 on the checkered-flag-waving day, Nov. 4th.”

Signaling the importance of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes for the GOP ticket, the Alaska governor swung through the state Monday. She started in military-rich Virginia Beach with McCain, before stopping in suburban Richmond en route to heavily Democratic Northern Virginia.

“They know Virginia is a swing state, and they have to play — and play hard — here,” said Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation of Virginia, a conservative grass-roots organization.

Speaking to a crowd that Henrico County police chief Col. H.W. Stanley Jr. estimated at 20,000 to 25,000, Palin was at once loyal soldier and fierce critic, talking up McCain’s economic-recovery plan and putting down Democrat Barack Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal.

Palin, accompanied by her husband, Todd, attributed the financial crisis and continuing credit freeze to “Wall Street bankers and brokers . . . and the predatory lenders who so took advantage of so many Americans.”

Palin said Obama favored a “trillion [dollars] more” in new spending that would force higher taxes for working families and small businesses. Those claims were greeted with lusty boos from a crowd largely turned out in red — the television color code for the GOP.

Palin — wearing a dark skirt and a white shirt, the sleeves of which were turned up, apparently because of the summer-like weather — drew hearty cheers when, referring to her son, Trigg, who has Down syndrome, and special-needs children, she said, “There are the world’s standards of perfection and there are God’s.”

After praising the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Palin alluded to protesters in the audience — none, however, were spotted. The crowd thundered when Palin said, “Thank those veterans who have given them the honor to protest.”

The Associated Press reported that Palin accidentally mistook some of her own fans for protesters. People on the perimeter could not hear Palin and shouted, “louder, louder.”

Hank Williams Jr., the country-western star, skewered the Democratic ticket with a send-up of his hit, “Family Tradition.” Williams, wearing a cowboy hat, sunglasses and a Washington Redskins jersey, intoned about a favorite target of Republicans — the “left-wing, liberal media.”

Williams compared Palin to a bear protecting its young: “If you mess with her cubs, she’s gonna take off her gloves. That’s an American female tradition.”

Del. William R. Janis, R-Henrico, attending the rally with his son, Robert, said the event would energize the Republican rank and file and was a “tangible demonstration that Virginia is not Obama-Biden country . . . This is still a reliably red state.”

Jeff E. Schapiro is a staff writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.