You have to love a Maureen Dowd column that starts like this:
You know what I’m thinking, because you’re thinking it, too. If Barack Obama had chosen Hillary Clinton as his running mate, we would now be looking forward to the greatest night in the history of American politics: the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate between Ma Barker and Sarah Barracuda. Now, alas, we’ll have to wait until 2012 when the two fiercest competitors on the trail will no doubt face off in the presidential debate, with Palin still riding high from her 2008 field-dressing of Obama (who’s now back in the Senate convening his subcommittee on Afghanistan).
It is all quite a lot of fun, but Dowd’s fantasy 2012 debate also has a measure of truth in it. Dowd’s fictional Palin explains to her fictional opponent Hillary:
“Your night-shift, blue-collar-waitress, boilermaker routine didn’t fool me. It’s in your polls but it’s in my D.N.A. I’ve actually been up at 3 a.m. — gutting moose.”
Well, that’s right. Palin is a real blue-collar, small town gal who doesn’t just relate to the type of voters who supported Hillary in the primary — she is one of them. And if Palin exceeds Hillary in her authentic appeal to these voters, imagine how is she going to stack up against Barack Obama and Joe Biden (who hasn’t lived in Scranton for decades and has been viewing the little people from the confines of a taxpayer-supported Amtrak train)? Obama can devise all the bio flicks he wants (and excise his Ivy League education). But it is obvious even without his Bittergate comments that his milieu is Hyde Park and Harvard. His supporters can insist all they like that Obama’s mother was of modest means, but he is a product of elite schools and leftwing politics.
Among the many benefits of the Palin pick which the mainstream media missed (while they were busy trashing her parenting skills) this past week is this: she’s the only one of the four presidential ticket participants who doesn’t have to pretend to be an average American. That’s no small thing in an election in which everyone is jousting to be the most “authentic” candidate in the field.
