I recently got a forwarded message from someone with the subject line: "still undecided?" and a nonverbal "message" that included the picture above and one more: of Sarah Palin in what my old Welsh lady friend used to call a "pussy pelmet" — a scandalously short leather skirt — and perilously high heels, looking like a paralegal putting herself through community college as a call-girl. 

I gathered I was supposed to cackle with gleeful scorn at Palin for her penchant for posing in trashy garb with big guns.  I didn't.  It would be kind of hypocritical of me.  As someone who is trying to ween himself from age-inappropriate tight tees (I threw a big bag of them out in my recent move), I'm not going to judge her on appearance and accessories. 

It's a good thing I won't have to.  The photo's a fake.  But the point of the email comes across loud and clear: that cringe of puritan distaste on the part of my liberal cohort at the plebian sensibilities of Palin and her provincial clan.  It's not just that her politics are wrong, which should be enough.  It's that her tastes, her education, her sensibility are all très, très déclassé. 

I'll admit I had my doubts about McCain's Palin pick.  But this viral email has helped me come around to the genius of it.  Not only does Palin deliver evangelicals, but with her brash, brassy style, she brings out the absolute worst in those who fell hard for Obama, who are gasping and clucking their tongues like a chorus of church ladies at the sheer inappropriateness of it all.  Their reaction alone will deliver blue collar swing voters in droves.  It's one reason that the Democratic Party, which used to stand for the working classes (and still offers them a better deal than its rivals) has been abandoned by its natural constituency, replaced by those who vicariously "feel their pain."

It's easy for folks living in the Ivy League bubble to forget that only a little over a quarter of Americans even have a Bachelors degree. It's also easy for them to make the wrong assumptions based on this.  Like, for instance, the self-flattering notion that a higher degree indicates higher IQ.  That, in other words, there is some necessary correlate between intelligence and education, when, in fact, the game is rigged, and education level still has more to do with economic advantage than IQ.  A truth that points to a failure of liberal ideology in practice, if anything. 

Boston itself, by the way, despite its nearly fifty colleges and universities, barely cracks the top ten in the brainiest city category, after Raleigh, Minneapolis and Atlanta, according to CNNMoney.com.  There are, in other words, pockets of educated privilege even in Cambridge, neatly isolated from the reality of economic hardship all around them about which they seemingly never tire of talking.  They're terribly outraged about it all, you can be sure.  But with their abstract notions of class struggle and their Buy Green! approach to Global Climate Anxiety Disorder, it's not hard to see why many are baffled by Sarah Palin's appeal to so many others. 

Palin allows the GOP to work its winning formula again.  The simple, well-worn narrative goes like this: social-engineering liberal intellectuals in the Democratic Party are not of the classes they're advocating for.  (If you're thinking: well, neither are Republicans, think again.  Republicans these days openly petition for the wealthy.  How they win elections doing it is by appealing to what I heard one journalist recently refer to as the "aspirational aspect of American character," by which he meant Americans' belief in upward mobility.  Republicans, the story goes, are advocating not only for the rich, but for the ability of the rest of us to get rich.)

Is the GOP totally off-base to insinuate that Democrats can't actually stand those they're so passionately, eloquently advocating for?  That they can't stand the way "those people" dress or talk, their impossible ignorance, vulgarity, and animal brutality?  Not totally.  Not when you're talking trash.  White trash, I mean.  And, beyond the guns and bikini gore, that was the point of that viral email with the picture of Palin in it. 

Make no mistake.  As her recent interviews prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, Sarah Palin should not be anywhere near the oval office.  Alaska seems a good place for her, about as far away from the nuclear button as you can get and still be on US soil.  But it's got nothing to do with her taste in bikinis or slutty skirts (real or imagined).  And to snicker and sneer at her for it doesn't help your cause any more than it did when Bush was the recipient of The Darwin Award.  In fact, if Palin brings out the snooty wing of the Democratic Party she will have done the GOP a tremendous service.

The novelty of McCain's choice, the brash Hockey mom persona of his pick, and (not least) the fact that it was a poke in the eye of his opponent, have all energized the GOP.  It's had the effect — presto-change-o! — of making Obama appear the more conventional of the two candidates. And Palin could deliver the coup de grâce: convincing enough swing voters that Obama's from the snooty wing of his Party, too.

There's been some talk that Palin is unlike anything we've seen before, but she's not.  And putting it that way misses the point precisely.  She is, in fact, a very familiar type in middle America.  The brash, confident hockey mom is just an amped up version of say, Debbie Davisson Phelps.  With none of the preening upper middle class pretensions of the soccer mom, she can hold her own among the boys.

Those of us who grew up in working class families where mom was the only female fully grasp Palin's appeal.  It was four against one in our family, and my mother could take us all with one hand tied behind her back.  She didn't have time to argue the finer points of feminism, juggling a full-time job of necessity, shuttling us around, and partnering with my dad to run the household.  She was walking the walk when desperate housewives like Betty Friedan were popping Valium and romanticizing the rat race.  Mom never shot a moose (that I know of) but I wouldn't put it past her.

Palin's the MILF next-door type.  If her politics weren't so thoroughly noxious (and they needn't be as noxious as they are), she could be the Demi Moore of American politics, the ultimate MILF.  She's the cool mom.  The kind who'd buy your Hockey team buds a case of beer as long as you drank it in the back yard.  Evangelicalism is not so much a religion as a cultural movement, so pointing out that her lifestyle seems to contradict her creed shows a lack of understanding of both.  She is undeniably a charismatic campaigner and a credible People-Magazine populist.

What white working class people see at first glance in Brand Palin is a woman who has succeeded by tenacity of will, not an ivy league education, who didn't need a hand-out or a hand up, but clawed her way with painted press-ons to the top of the heap, and did not succumb to the pretensions of the ruling elite when she got there.  Sure, she's corrupt and vindictive.  In fact, she's blatant and balls-out about it.  She's the one who called herself a pit bull with lipstick.  What you see is what you get.

In answer to the email:  of course, I'm not undecided.  And I'm fairly sure that not many on the long list of recipients of that viral message are, either.  It has made the rounds of the Boston bubble, where the mere mention of Palin's name garners gasps of horror.  And her politics are horrifying — in that tedious teenage slasher movie franchise way. I mean, with the GOP, it's an endless series of sequels with different B-grade stars and the same plot, innit?  But if the Democrats simply can't turn down a role in the franchise, the least they can do is try not to make such perfect villains.