I’m pretty sure this isn’t the effect the RNC was hoping for after Sarah Palin’s speech:

St. Paul delegates are giddy with Sarah Palin’s speech. The mood is buoyant, enlivened, energized. It’s a party. There are revelers. The faces shine with joy and pleasure at a convention finally fully underway. Their VP nominee did it – she hit it out of the park. There is joy in Mudville, here on the ground.

And it worked wonders – for the Dems.

In the past several hours, Dems I’ve spoken with and who’ve flooded my inbox are energized. A woman friend and Democrat who had not worked for Obama’s campaign: “I am volunteering tomorrow.” An Obama organizer who was operating on fumes five months ago: “They are not getting away with this. 10 hours of call time tomorrow.” A shorter read of the mood: “Let’s get it on.”

When you also factor in that Palin’s speech has succeeded in raking in $8 million for the Obama campaign and only $1 million for McCain the numbers simply don’t lie.  This was a win, and not for the GOP.

One of the things that differentiates the primary season from the general election is that in the primary going for the “red meat” issues and exciting the base are good things.  You, quite simply, need the base to win.  In the general though the ballgame completely changes.  Now rather than just courting members of your own party to have to expand your appeal to the squishy middle, the undecideds.  Going hyper-partisan as Rudy “9/11″ Giuliani and Sarah Palin did (or, more accurately, as Bush speech writer Matthew Scully penned) will, while appealing to the party faithful, do little more then alienate the very voters a politician needs to try to attract.

Mockery to be effective can’t seem mean-spirited. The open taunting last night was off putting. Giuliani and Palin blew it completely by ridiculing, for example, Obama’s work as a community organizer. Delegates taunting Obama as a “Zero” are the opposite of endearing. When Giuliani sneered at Obama’s rise to prominence as “the kind of thing that could happen only in America”, it sounded like he meant that Americans are boobs. The irony of Palin’s sudden rise from obscurity seemed lost on him.

In fact Giuliani got so carried away with his attacks that he even sneered at Hillary Clinton. The last person who credibly could have joined in the belittling of Obama’s record was Sarah Palin. Yet she obviously relished her over-the-top attacks.

It was almost as if the strategy was to drive undecided voters straight into Obama’s camp.

Given the precarious demographic situation (image link) the GOP finds themselves in this year one would think they’d take all of this into account.  Apparently not.