As Sarah Palin winked, wiggled, and gee-whizzed her way through the debate last night, a number of women were gathering together in homes all over Alaska to watch the debate and prepare their next steps. Already in the last month they’ve come together to organize major marches, petitions, and thousands of female voices to speak out against Palin.

The women against Palin movement in Alaska has grown beyond grassroots. In fact, up until McCain chose Palin as a running mate a few weeks ago, it was small and distant and barely a seed. But since then, vociferous female bloggers in Alaska helped organize an anti-Palin rally in mid-September that included around 1,000 mostly female Palin opponents carrying signs like “Palin does not speak for me.” It was the biggest political rally the state has ever seen.

And just last week those same women helped organize an online petition to demand the removal of Alaska Attorney General Talis Colberg, who is accused of continually obstructing the ongoing Troopergate investigation being conducted by the Alaska Legislative Council. Why are they suddenly gathering en masse to deliver a message? They want the rest of America to know that, not only is Palin skilled in the art of mollifying and winking, she’s adroit at hoodwinking, too.

Maia Nolan, an Alaskan who blogs at OwnTheSidewalk.com, says she resents the McCain campaign exploiting Palin in an effort to collect disgruntled Hillary Clinton voters. Nolan, who supported Clinton, says the strategy was a sexist move, and not only does she not intend to support McCain and Palin, she says the public outside of Alaska is woefully misinformed about McCain’s VP pick.

“There seems to be this idea out there that she’s an Alaskan folk hero, with her 80 percent approval rating and her Iron Dog champion husband,” Nolan tells MnIndy. “People may not realize that she came into office with a 90 percent approval rating on day one. Why? She’s not [former governor] Frank Murkowski. All she had to do to be popular was show up and not buy another jet. Not only did she not buy another jet,” Nolan says, “she tacked an extra $1200 onto everyone’s Permanent Fund Dividend check — the amount of which was announced right around the time that last pre-VP poll was taken. Of course she was popular.”

But, Nolan adds, Palin’s Dividend Checks and slash on taxes have hurt smaller outstate regions who aren’t so generous with their support. “She may not be so popular in places like Adak,” Nolan says, “a remote Aleutian village whose residents have been notified they need to leave before winter comes because the town can no longer afford fuel for heat and power.”

Equal rights?

A woman who goes only by the name of AK Muckraker and blogs at Mudflats agrees that the public is being deceived about Palin, and adds that words like “equal rights” falling out of her mouth are just as ill-conceived and meaningless as the rest of her word stews. It’s for those reasons she blogs nearly every day about the issues, and hopes women everywhere are listening.

“I think that the public automatically assumes since she is a woman and a mother that she is pro-woman and pro-family,” AK Muckraker tells me. “They need to understand that while Palin may describe herself in these terms, her own definition of these terms falls far out of mainstream American views. The fact that N.O.W., which hasn’t endorsed any presidential ticket since Mondale-Ferraro, has endorsed Obama-Biden, speaks volumes.”

Blogger Linda Kellen Biegel

Linda Kellen Biegel, who blogs at Blue Oasis, says the misconception of Palin as any kind of champion of woman’s rights is one of the scariest and most dangerous. “She is a woman yet there is no evidence that she supports issues that are important to women… quite the opposite,” Biegel says. “She doesn’t support equal pay for equal work. As the Mayor of Wasilla she cut the budget so that rape victims had to pay for their own forensic exams [rape kits] and refused to change that until then-Governor Knowles signed a law that demanded the city pay for them. There are over 900 families of children with disabilities who are on a waiting list for services, when Alaska’s $5 billion surplus sits in the bank.”

Biegel notes it would cost $45 million of the $5 billion surplus in the sixth-wealthiest state in the country to cover these families. She and other Alaskan bloggers say Palin’s record has consistently been anti-family and anti-women.

The great debate

So how’d she do last night? Just hours before the debate, Nolan had a prediction. “I expect that Palin, lacking the experience and expertise Sen. Biden brings to the debate, will resort to cheap shots and campaign-crafted sound bites.  I don’t expect her to actually debate the issues.  She didn’t know much about the issues when she ran for governor in 2006, and she actually made that work for her in the debates by making her better-prepared, more knowledgeable opponents seem like bean counters who were out of touch with what the people of Alaska really wanted.” She couldn’t have been more right if she had posed the question to Palin’s talkative God.

Indeed, some pundits were left shocked at Palin’s performance last night. She cheerled for the GOP ticket and delivered her talking points as if she were at a rally instead of a debate. She skirted questions and reiterated key words and phrases. She made Biden appear like he focused too much on minituae and, in some cases, moderator Gwen Ifill. While Palin constantly looked at the camera—the “people”–Biden erred, perhaps, by focusing on the moderator and on numbers and policies.

By any reasonable calculus, Palin actually had the advantage going in. The bar had been lowered after a series of interviews.  She had no Washington record to defend herself against. And with many softball questions, she never had to discuss McCain’s real record and could instead refer to him as a concept. In a sense, she did what the right often criticizes Obama for doing: She chose style over substance.

Blogger and radio host Shannyn Moore

But for some Alaskan women, Palin’s small town librarian performance was exactly what they expected. Blogger and Air America radio host Shannyn Moore says she wasn’t surprised at all by Palin’s folksy production. “She did what I thought she’d do,” Moore says. “She didn’t answer questions. She talked around questions and avoided specifics. And she was a bit snarky, winked, and had some sort of accent no Alaskan I know has. The bar was lowered and she went over it.”

AK Muckraker was actually a bit surprised by the new winky Palin, but not her talking points. Muckraker says Palin has used the same strategy of avoiding questions during her short time as governor of Alaska.  “I was turned off by her winking and nose crinkling and cutesy, folksy answers,” she says. “My perception of her performance is that she was well prepared with a series of talking points.  She chose whichever one fit closest with the question, and if she didn’t have one, she used the energy talking point for good measure. I thought she did better than most people were expecting, but that after sifting through the ‘blizzard of words’ it was obvious that she didn’t really answer the questions, nor was there much substance to what she said.”

So what does AK Muckraker think will be the biggest outcome of Palin’s performance? “A great Saturday Night Live skit.”

Several weeks ago, long before she proved herself incapable of answering simple questions posed by marginally inquisitive journalists, Sarah Palin’s most distinguishing fault was her undeterred ability to stand before affectionate crowds and invent a political narrative to which she was not entitled. With excruciating regularity, Palin lied about her position on the “Bridge to Nowhere” — a comical distortion that reflected, perhaps, a belief that the internet does not actually contain information pertaining to Alaska. More broadly, she demonstrated a great capacity for autobiographical oversimplification, whinnying about her record as a budgetary “maverick” who sallied forth against Congressional earmarks, who functioned as wolfsbane to the entrenched powers in Alaska, who salted the earth where reckless spending had once flourished.

Little of this withstood informed scrutiny, but for a brief moment, the demoralized conservative base of the Republican party gibbered with delight. With a desiccated John McCain in tow, Sarah Palin — hockey mom and renowned gobbler of moose meat — was momentarily enshrined as the future of the Republican Party. Red blood coursed once more to the extremities of conservative America, and barbaric yawps resounded from its oxygen-starved lungs. They had seen the future, and its name was Sarah Palin.

Within two weeks, as everyone knows, the bubble collapsed as the candidate revealed herself to be somewhat witless. Palin’s few unscripted public moments bore less resemblance to the English language than to the old surrealist parlor game called the Exquisite Corpse. A self-avowedly voracious consumer of news, Palin was strangely unable to describe and evaluate the Bush Doctrine — a “worldview” that was, in fact, responsible for her own son’s deployment to Iraq. Nor could she discuss with any coherence at least one of the major branches of government. When asked at a town hall meeting about her signature issue — oil — Palin coughed up a verbal hairball that was both opaque and deeply misinformed. And on it went, saecula saeculorum.

And so Palin’s advocates are understandably delighted by her performance in last night’s debate, which did not actually produce the widely-expected fiasco. Palin completed a surprising number of her sentences, and she showed evidence of having successfully assimilated lengthy portions of her stump speech. She was clearly excited to discover that she could recite the occasional facts and figures, and she drew attention to these achievement several times. Visibly and audibly nervous through much of the conversation, Palin nevertheless managed to keep smiling and striking the populist dulcimer, using phrases such as “darn right,” “doggone it,” and “heck of a lot” while trumpeting the virtues of “Joe Six Pack” (a strangely inappropriate metaphor coming from the governor of a state with some of the worst alcohol-related problems in the nation). In all, Palin heroically exceeded the lowest performance expectations in the history of vice presidential debating. To point out that Palin committed a number of gross factual errors — on Afghanistan, on the role of the vice president — seems uncharitable somehow.

It’s likely, though, that Palin’s surprisingly non-cringe-inducing performance will have minimal — if any — effect on the shape of the race. Unlike party conventions, which historically produce significant polling gains for candidates, presidential “debate bumps” typically range from 1-2 points, with vice presidential debates mattering even less. Whether or not Sarah Palin’s nomination reinvigorated the Republican campaign for a few weeks in early September, John McCain received in the end a fairly routine post-convention bounce that dissipated, predictably and coincidentally, right about that Palin began speaking in tongues. To the degree that Palin succeeded in the debate — and initial evidence indicates that “success” does not equate with “winning” — we won’t be treated to a replay of the early September triumphalism that credited her with bearing McCain aloft to victory on a sedan chair. Indeed, as Megan McArdle noted, the “persuadable voter” EKG for Palin plummeted each time she mentioned John McCain’s name.

If, as Nate Silver surmises, the debate signals the end of the “Sarah Palin chapter of the campaign,” we’ll soon be able to add her to the list of irritating one-hit wonders — like “The Macarena” or “Rock Me Amadeus” — that we’d just as soon never hear again.