Several folks wrote me over the course of the last couple of weeks to ask my thoughts on Sarah Palin, since I had not posted any before the day before yesterday.  To be honest, after my initial surprise at McCain's pick, as her positions (or whatever) became better known, I was almost paralyzed with boredom by her. 

It's déjà vu all over again, innit?  A brash, bellicose, brazenly unqualified candidate, incurious about the wide world but cocksure of her place at the center of it.  Not at all out of character for the party that thrust George W. Bush on us all nearly eight years ago.  She even pronounces nuclear "nucular."  And the psychology of the pick is the same.  Her appeal rests partly in how placing her a heartbeat away from the presidency mocks the seriousness with which Democrats invest good government. 

Obama's choice of Biden, on the other hand, while about as unsexy as it could possibly be, was a serious, responsible attempt at a balanced ticket.  McCain's choice was reckless, and worse: it was mean-spirited, openly mocking and willfully destructive of the earnest fears and hopes of half the electorate.  However much ego there was in the Democratic primary, the players were passionate about the possibility of change.  The Republican ticket, by contrast, is characterized by stark, pathological sameness.  It's like, with an eight-hundred channel spectrum, all they can think to watch is Lawrence Welk.

There is really no need to look further into Sarah Palin.  We all know she's unqualified.  That's why they picked her.  Republicans are electrified by what she represents — an open assault on the earnestness of the pollyannas on the Left — it's mean girl politics at its leanest and meanest. The only reason for the press to probe further is to expose the extent of the mockery, the cruelty of the joke she's the curdled punchline of. 

Nobody puts the "mock" in democracy like the GOP, that's for sure.  It doesn't work as well for Democrats because Democrats are more likely to run on warmer, fuzzier appeals to our "higher angels," often suggesting, sometimes too stridently, that self-interest can be tamed by and subordinated to the good of the whole.  At their best, conservatives believe in the unlikely coincidence of the two, but the latter always grows out of steadfast pursuit of the former, never the other way around.

If only heaping much deserved scorn on the Republicans would work for Democrats, but it won't.  Because at heart Democrats are the party of True Believers.  However much the Right crows about its steadfast Christian values, it has always been the Left that plays Christ to the Right's mocking Pilate.  And every election is our calvary.