Sarah Palin has rapidly become a national political star and is boosting McCain's campaign against his Democratic rival Barack Obama after being chosen by Republican presidential candidate John McCain as his running mate.
Many in California say that the surprising emergence of the formerly obscure Alaska governor in American election politics reminds of them their governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the San Francisco Chronicle daily reported Wednesday.
To Californians, Palin's campaign mirrors what happened in their state when Hollywood star Schwarzenegger reached for the governor's mantle in 2003 as a political outsider and reformer, according to the paper.
In an analysis that put Palin's story in a different context, the newspaper said she was using just the same script that transformed Schwarzenegger overnight from movie star to candidate to leader of America's most populous state and the world's seventh-largest economy.
And it is not a surprise that Steve Schmidt, the man who helped Schwarzenegger's successful bid for the gubernatorial post, is now in charge of the McCain-Palin campaign.
A series of new polls have showed that Palin has given a major boost to the McCain campaign, exciting the party's supporters base, winning over white women and all but erasing Obama's lead.
"There is a lot of similarities" between Palin and Schwarzenegger, Republican strategist Rob Stutzman told the newspaper. Stutzman was communication director for Schwarzenegger when he was running for the governor's office first time in 2003.
"The biggest parallels I see is that they both come out of the blue. And the voters are desperate for a hero," he said. "People fall in love with the idea of a hero that can actually provide a refreshing change."
Stutzman said that Americans are infatuated now, but the drama has yet to play out, the only concern is that people love celebrity, and also love to see celebrities fall.
And those who followed the first Schwarzenegger campaign also recognize another familiar theme -- attempts to back the press off from looking too closely at the candidate and the maverick record. Media organizations in Alaska complained that their governor has refused all interview requests since her nomination.
Meanwhile, Palin is expected to go back to her state Wednesday for the first time since she was named vice presidential candidate at the Republican Nation Convention last week. Local reporters now hope that Palin will have a chance to take questions from a member of the press while she is in Alaska.
Source:Xinhua
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