Shake it up

Regarding the news about McCain's VP, I'm not going to pretend I can come up with anything better than this piece from last night's The Daily Show:


After showing some footage of Palin speaking after McCain announced her, they poke fun at the pitch of Palin's voice, but I noticed something else from that same footage. When Palin says the women of America "can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all," she accents her point by stabbing her extended index finger in the air in front of her. Is it just me, or does McCain seem to recoil slightly?

Methinks the first thing Governor Palin needs to learn as the campaign moves forward: You don't make sudden gestures around the elderly.

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I heard that some had called Palin a GILF (variation on MILF with "Governor"), and then it seemed the obvious next step is VPILF. However, apparently that term has been around for over two months, with vpilf.com already in place.

The campaign is going to be more interesting over the next couple months that I was expecting it would be.

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Digressing from the silly jokes:

I am not politically savvy. There are many, many others out there who follow politics much more closely than I do. That's why I don't attempt to offer cogent analysis of the topic; I don't delude myself that it's a strength.

However, even back at the point where Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign, I never thought she would get picked as Obama's VP. I cannot explain exactly why that was; it just didn't strike me as likely. I didn't know who would get selected, but it wouldn't be her.

At least a month ago, the thought occurred to me that the Republicans putting a woman on the ticket with McCain would be a clever ploy to try to appeal (at least ostensibly) to Clinton supporters feeling disenfranchised. But as an admittedly jaded observer, I dismissed the possibility of them resorting to such a measure. The GOP strategists were obviously very smartly ruthless (as evidenced by the past two elections), but still, this was the party of "traditional values" and having a woman in the Number 2 slot is not exactly traditional. That still seemed too likely to be seen as progressive, no matter how much of a right-winger they could find.

So when I turned on the TV yesterday morning and saw the "breaking news" about Sarah Palin being selected as the running mate I was struck with a surprising lack of surprise. Frankly, I was mildly disturbed at having been even mildly prescient about this possibility and see it really happen. That's not the sort of thing that occurs in my existence. Perhaps I missed the cynical comfort of having politicians go with the obvious (i.e., picking another white male) rather than the remote potential that even I couldn't believe.

I'm just noting that over the decades of my life I have grown accustomed to having a particular relationship with the world of politics, and this was outside of that norm. This was not any sort of "Hey look I smart I was--I kind of anticipated something that perhaps many pundits didn't see coming" reaction; this was "Crap--I kind of anticipated something that perhaps many pundits didn't see coming."

The rhetoric of "change" was bandied about a lot during the campaigns, but I must admit: This was not the change I thought would occur.