Well, it seems that MSNBC has an article about Palin's potential impact on this election. The gem of a quote that follows is slapped on near the end.
Sherry Morrison, 46, a medical billing executive who lives in Roanoke called Palin's speech "a wink and a nod to the Hillary supporters. It was, 'Hey, if the Democrats are too stupid to break that glass ceiling, we will do it for them.' "
Sherry Morrison, in that ridiculous, childish, and mentally deficient 'thought' expressed above, embodies the stupidest, least desirable, and most reprehensible of all the potential views one could take as a feminist. She's exactly the gender-focused, cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face woman (and especially Hillary Supporter) that McCain would love to have vote for him.
But, believe it or not, the feminism issues raised by McCain in this surprise aren't necessarily the most important things to focus on. Instead, this event should be viewed in the larger context of Republican strategy.
Republicans have long had some political savvy when it comes to exploiting certain classes of people. If they hadn't had any, they wouldn't have been so successful at gaining the power they've had in the last eight years, and nearly destroying this nation in the process.
Look no further than the southern states for evidence. Across this region, time and again, for decades, the majority is very conservative and tend to vote that way. Even the democrats elected in this region tend to be far more conservative than their northern and western counterparts. Moreover, time and again, the people in this region vote against their own interests, be they economic, civil liberties, or foreign policy.
The reason republicans are successful is multifaceted and can't be given the depth it truly deserves in a Dialy Kos user diary. I'll summarize. Republicans are successful in their attempts mainly because they recognize how to play up both the ignorance and the hopes of their targets.
In economic matters, for example, Republicans have successfully deluded people into thinking that "In America, anyone and everyone can 'make it'" is the same as "In America, anyone and everyone would 'make it' if only the government would stop interfering!." Thus, these people believe that republican policies of pro-business, anti-regulation, anti-tax-on-business are helpful to them directly, in spite of the years and decades of evidence to the contrary. It helps that republicans have been quite successful in creating something of a feedback loop with respect to the government: it's easy to scapegoat the government as the source and responsibility for these individuals' failures when failures of government abound (see: Katrina, oil prices, etc.), and it's easy to make government failures abound when one is in a position of power to appoint failures and incompetents to run it.
The same sort of thing is what McCain and his republican campaign strategists are attempting here with Palin. They hope to snag that category of woman who is so focused on getting a vagina into the White House that they either ignore their intellectual alarm bells or just don't have any to impede the thought.
Palin is anti-other-women. She believes we should live in a country where all women should be forced to live by her peculiar personal morality; where women do not have the same degree of freedom and rights to medical procedures for their bodies that men have. She believes we should live in a country where our children can and should be indoctrinated with religious mythology because the science behind evolution can't possibly trump her god (if you think this isn't anti-women, and hell, anti-human, consider the medical advances that will be hindered when the next generation of religious-indoctrination-addled twits fall even further behind the rest of the world on things like stem-cell research). She believes we should live in a country where it's okay to continue Bush's policy of cronyism and the appointment of incompetents to government offices (thus helping to not help people, such as single, abused, and similarly positioned women and men alike). And so on.
And John McCain wants women to vote for all these things, and against women's interests, just because a woman is on the ticket. He'll get his wish to some extent, thanks to shamelessly ignorant or stupid (or both) people like Sherry Morrison.