Just Call Her Sarah Gipper-Cuda?

As if the reviews weren't glowing enough from last night's phenomenal performance, Sarah (I think we're on a first-name basis by now:) receives the highest possible praise from one of today's most prominent conservatives. Michael Reagan hails our Barracuda as the second-coming of his father, Ronald Reagan, contradicting his previous admonitions to the Right to accept the fact that there would never be another. I must admit, until Sarah came on the scene -- well, more specifically -- until I became aware of her formidable presence on the American political landscape, I too wondered (with the notable exception of Gov. Bobby Jindal), if that was the case. Probably best to heed Michael's advice and just "move on."

Au contraire (to express it in one of Obama's preferred languages)! President Reagan's eldest son now joyfully admits, mea culpa:

I've been trying to convince my fellow conservatives that they have been wasting their time in a fruitless quest for a new Ronald Reagan to emerge and lead our party and our nation. I insisted that we'd never see his like again because he was one of a kind.

I was wrong!

Wednesday night I watched the Republican National Convention on television and there, before my very eyes, I saw my Dad reborn; only this time he's a she.

And what a she!

In one blockbuster of a speech, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin resurrected my Dad's indomitable spirit and sent it soaring above the convention center, shooting shock waves through the cynical media's assigned spaces and electrifying the huge audience with the kind of inspiring rhetoric we haven't heard since my Dad left the scene.

This was Ronald Reagan at his best -- the same Ronald Reagan who made the address known now solely as "The Speech," which during the Goldwater campaign set the tone and the agenda for the rebirth of the traditional conservative movement that later sent him to the White House for eight years and revived the moribund GOP.

Perhaps we should call her Ronette Gipper-Cuda?