[I hate to post and run, without reading the board thoroughly to see prior discussion, but it's that kind of weekend...]
Aside from the delectable Youtube video of "McCain's Brain", zooming in on Johhny boy staring at her ass ELEVEN times in 1:45, Palin gives us the opening we lacked in the Quayle-Bentsen debate.
Jack Kennedy was not around to pop up and speak about Quayle's qualifications to lead, but Hillary Clinton is about Palin's, and when Palin invokes her name, she ought to be ready for the blowback. She isn't. (So, be gentle with her, Senator ;) )
In a sense, this is Hillary's opportunity to become the VP "attack dog" she might have been...
...had she been chosen by Obama, and she should stand in for Biden in that portion of the combat, but she needs to do it deftly, in a way that I'm sure she knows well.
(I'm thinking of that Zen story about the executioner so swift that his victim asks him "so, when are you going to cut my head off?" to which the executioner replies, "Simply nod.")
And the vehicle for Hillary that is most commending itself to me is the Anita Hill "teaching moment" on Clarence Thomas's workplace harassment that generalized into a nationwide discussion. We were glued to the TV sets for days.
[OK, I have to just toss this out and run, sorry for just the briefest outline of it, but ---]
What Hillary drew upon as a corporate Democrat was a current of Feminism that had turned unfortunately anti-Progressive, and even tended reactionary, where the ideas of Feminism that had been inculturated were no longer helpful to the larger anti-Fascist purpose of Progressvism.
It is time for Hillary -- and she knows the subject well enough -- to become the nation's instructor on the true two-century current of Feminism as an expression of FAIRNESS rather than hostility.
In my time coming up, women were THE instructors on anti-war, social justice, economic fairness that was liberal politics. I've missed those voices joining Barbara Boxer's rock-solid political stances.
When Hillary faces (in the national discussion, rather than face-to-face) Palin's fascist religious cultism -- a very deep alliance that has driven Republican politics for 35 years -- she will show a new generation (actually two generations) the Progressive roots of Feminism that encourage women to stand against our descent into the smarmy embrace of Margaret Atwood's Gilead in "The Handmaid's Tale."
[sorry, I know that's too much, too sketchily thrown upon the heap, but it's two days' driving around thoughts, and it's gotta do for now.]
I hope that campaign readers will see this as I have -- probably already have -- and suggest to Hillary that she has this wonderful invitation to provide something that we have lacked for so long, and something that we have believed in so deeply...
...and i'm sure other readers have seen this opening -- and more -- and can suggest thoughts surpassing the few offered here...