The Sarah Palin pick: adding insult to injury

Well, Republican presidential nominee John McCain certainly reclaimed his "maverick" status with his pick of virtually unknown Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. It's probably one of the kinder things people in the Republican party have been calling him after his selection of a person who almost no one outside of McCain himself seems to believe was his best available choice.

Watching McCain try to defend his pick might be comical -- "Alaska is our largest state" (unless you count the 46 others with a larger population) -- if it wasn't so frightening. Here is a person whose career highlight up until 18 months ago was serving two terms as mayor of an Alaskan town of 7,000 people. The only 3:00 am phone calls she's used to getting are demands for better snowplow coverage.

What's truly stunning -- and so very telling -- about this pick, though, is that McCain actually seems to think it was clever. He actually appears to believe that putting the arch-conservative Palin on the ticket will pull in droves of disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters despite the fact that Palin's record on every significant issue facing our country today -- war, the economy, the environment, civil rights -- is either non-existent or diametrically opposed to that of Hillary Clinton. The underlying assumption here is that the only factor that really mattered to all of those Hillary voters, the only reason they all supported her so passionately for so long, was her gender.

It's hard to imagine a more insulting set of assumptions being made about a group of supposedly intelligent and independent-minded voters. Leave it to Jon Stewart and The Daily Show to distill these assumptions to their rawest essence, i.e. "Sarah Palin may be the ideological opposite of Hillary Clinton, but she's her gynecological twin..." (Warning: link contains the usual irrevent language and razor-sharp humor.)