A feisty, confident Palin makes her introduction

To a great degree, Sarah Palin's highly anticipated speech to the Republican National Convention last night didn't matter. In her less-than-a-week in the spotlight, the vice presidential nominee has already become a starkly polarizing figure, a national Rorschach test. There was little she could do, in a half-hour address, to win over or alienate any mind that has already been settled.

So Palin's address was, in many ways, an impassioned exercise in denial, a way of pretending that she's still the largely unknown quantity she was when she became John McCain's surprise running mate selection. She introduced herself to a public that is largely obsessed. She pointed out her family, from her 17-year-old daughter Bristol - who stood and showed off her pregnant belly - to her youngest son, who has Down syndrome, "a perfectly beautiful baby boy named Trig." Her husband, Todd, lifted the sleeping infant's hand and gave a gentle victory shake.

Then Palin said, in what seemed both a profound truth and a grand understatement, "Our family has the same ups and downs as any other."

Since last Friday, the frenzied, blanket Palin coverage has been a strange experience to watch, since the candidate herself has largely been absent. (Her image has appeared in countless YouTube videos, in slideshows set to the music of ABBA and Jimi Hendrix.) The vitriol from both sides has been spewed by surrogates, as Palin has been sequestered to study policy and work on her speech.

But that vitriol - charges of hypocrisy from the left, of sexism from the right - has turned this general election, which once seemed destined to be a semisober policy debate, into something more visceral and emotional. Palin recalibrates the race, rearranges the issues that matter, reminds us how much this country is still divided.

In the middle of such drama and trauma, there should have been little doubt that the Alaska governor would come out feisty last night, a self-described fighter in the Hillary Clinton mold, in her stylish but demure jacket and beads. Nor should anyone have been shocked that she presented herself as a counterpoint to the perceived Obama elitism, peppering her speech with Alaskan colloquialisms. ("They say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.")

Watch some of her previous speeches and media appearances, and you can understand why Palin is popular in Alaska. She has a casual demeanor, a comfort in leather and Gore-Tex, a vague hipness unusual in buttoned-up political circles. Challenged months ago on CNBC about the ethics investigation she faces in Alaska, she brushed off concern by saying, "It's cool." (And she did, indeed, put the governor's jet up for sale on eBay.)

Last night, she talked that talk, made the expected forays into policy and platform. As any vice presidential nominee would, she took a lot of sassy digs at Barack Obama. But she was largely there to sell herself. And she demonstrated the great irony of the debate about any personal narrative used for political gain - which applies to every politician, on either side of the aisle.

These aren't cyborg policy ciphers, after all, and aren't expected to be. All of them use their personal stories to cement their appeal. And Palin, for all of the protestations about steering clear of her personal life, isn't afraid to reference the parts of her life that make her seem most sympathetic. She proved, when talking about Trig, that she could use them effectively, announcing that families of special needs children "will have a friend and advocate in the White House."

As for the rest of the soap opera drama - the debate, fair or unfair or both, that her personal life has sparked - Palin was silent. She had little choice, nor do any of the candidates on either party's ticket. But rest assured, everything will be said, all over talk TV and talk radio and op-ed pages and the blogosphere, and the conversation won't end for a long, long time.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com