Thoughts on Sarah Palin

There's nothing "normal" about this election year. We had the epic Clinton-Obama struggle this spring, which did its damage, and then, 45 years after the March on Washington and Dr. King's "I Have a Dream Speech", we saw an African-American man accept the Democratic nomination to be President of the United States. What a truly historic occasion. Then, the next day, John McCain took over the media with his own historic (for much different reasons) choice for Vice President: Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. The "historicity" of Palin's selection was trumpeted across the airwaves, nearly eclipsing Obama's speech completely. But this was only because everyone was expecting McCain to pick another predictable Republican like Mitt Romney. The choice immediately smacked of 1) tokenism and 2) naked pandering to women voters. The theory the media settled on was that Palin, a pro-life evangelical Christian, would draw away disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters from Obama. While there may actually be a slice of the electorate that would be swayed from the starched suits and cool intellectualism of Clinton toward the lipsticked pit bull Palin, I don't really buy it, and the people who were really celebrating McCain's unexpected choice were the very voters who were lukewarm about McCain in the first place: social conservatives with absolutely nothing in common with Hillary Clinton.

Palin wowed the Republican National Convention and the news media in the days following, but now, a mere three weeks, and three devastatingly vapid television interviews later, it seems like some of the lipstick is wearing off. Does she agree with the Bush Doctrine, asks Charlie Gibson? Do you mean his general worldview, Palin responds daftly? How does Alaska's proximity to the most remote areas of Russia on one side and Canada on the other provide you with foreign policy experience, asks Katie Couric kindly? "Because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, they're in the state that I am the executive of," stammers Palin.

McCain could have asked anybody to be his running mate, and this is the best he could do? I felt this way about Bush, too - this guy is the best candidate for President in the Republican Party? (To be fair, I've had the same feelings on the democratic side of things before, too).

As I've been telling my wife for weeks, it's like a reality show, where former beauty queen-turned-mayor-turned-governor Sarah Palin, who's "just like us regular folks" is the leading contestant in "So You Want to Be Vice President?" Can't you see it? The gossipy, behind the scenes interviews, the candid shots of the family with the down syndrome baby and the pregnant teenage daughter, all the kids with names you couldn't make up if you tried. But half the country pulls for "our Sarah" and dials *45 on their Verizon Wireless phone at the end of the show. This is not a serious pick for VP, no matter how you slice it.