Palin's pairing with McCain has emboldened his campaign to issue a new ad proclaiming the GOP ticket as the harbinger of "change." She's a fresh, cheerful face on the scene and has put a whole new spring in McCain's step. They're the reform ticket now, don't you know. And that other celebrity guy, Obama...hell, he and his Democratic cronies in Washington are just "more of the same"...
Galling, oh yeah. We could fulminate into a frenzy over this, but with only 60 days to go, we've no time to waste. Don't get mad, get even, claimed one of our own many years ago, and we really must heed the call.
It occurs to me that Palin's downsides give us a whole new opportunity to seriously recast this new GOP ticket.
The public is very aware of how McCain moved to the Right to keep his campaign from diving deep. Now, with Palin, he's gone there even further, but her extreme views are just starting to become known. He wants folks to think of his team as a fresh new face of change - the face of the future. But, in fact, we can cement him to the past by stoking an already-established and not very flattering image of him as a captive right-winger - and add Palin's beliefs to the mix.
McCain/Palin: The Right Wing Ticket, goes straight to the heart of their ideologies, and the best part about it is the public will know it to be true. This GOP team is not only about voting with Bush 90% of the time (which is the ONE message the GOP can't cop from us), it's even more committed to overturning Roe v. Wade and putting Scalia/Thomas Supreme Court justices on the bench and drilling the hell out of our seas and the Alaskan national park instead of focusing on new fuels and teaching creationism in our schools and giving tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the middle class and on and on...
American voters like to hew to the center; extreme ideologies one way or the other are too frightening. And, frankly, the McCain/Palin ticket IS frightening when you really think about it.
Let's start thinking aloud.