And now let us hear form Max Gross on political matters...

If anybody out there wants to take any bets on the 2012 election, I'm willing to take Barack Obama.

This comes after multiple people I know (all of whom are educated on political matters) have said to me that they are very worried about President Obama's chances for reelection in 2012.

"I don't think he's got it sewn up at all," one friend of mine said to me recently.

"He doesn't have a chance in hell of getting reelected," said my father.

Well, my father's never correct on these matters -- so I'm not worried.

And, yes, I will admit that the President has had a rough couple of months. There are any number of mistakes President Obama could make that would sink his reelection. And I'm not convinced that he will win the overwhelming victory he won in 2008. He's going to have to work like hell to keep those GOP-tilting states like Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Indiana in his column. But Obama has one big advantage that I think will push him over the finish line:

The Republicans don't have a credible alternative.

Let's recall his potential challengers:

Mitt Romney. At this point, my money is on the Mittster to get the nomination. The GOP has a tendency to reward strong second placers in the next cycle, and while Mike Huckabee was technically second place in 2008, the Mittster is doing his best to make everybody think this was not the case.

I also think that given the fact that Romney is a reasonably smart guy, and a somewhat competent governor, he would probably be the GOP's wisest and most credible alternative. (He would also be the most responsible pick... Like that matters.) But Romney has, in my mind, at least three fatal flaws.

1) His Mormonism.

It's a shame that this should count against him -- but it does. (I don't think it's a total disqualifier, but he's going to need every last vote in 2012 and this will harm him.)

2) Health care.

The Mittster's Massachusetts health care bill was essentially the blueprint for Obamacare. This means he is going to have to face a choice -- attack his own stewardship as governor, or cede the healthcare debate to Obama. Either way, Mitt is screwed.

3) He is the most transparently phony politician I've ever seen.

I actually think phoniness shouldn't be a disqualifier in and of itself. (I remain proud of my 2004 vote for John Kerry.) But when half of your own party thinks you're a shameless panderer, you're in big trouble.

Sarah Palin. There's a part of this old Democrat that lies in bed at night with visions of Sarah Palin winning the nomination dancing in his head... Because if she is the nominee, as Daniel Larison recently predicted, Obama wins a 1984-level landslide.

Palin has great appeal to the fringe right -- and no appeal to anyone else.

While Rich Lowry might feel his heart going pitter pat every time she speaks, the majority of the country thinks she's a bubble headed moron, who couldn't finish out a single term as governor and couldn't handle an interview with Katie Couric. I know numerous right wing Republicans who agree with her on every issue -- and yet can't stand the fact that she's the face of their movement. "She's right," someone I know who was active in the GOP said to me, "but she doesn't know why she's right -- and that worries me."

Mike Huckabee. Yet another 49 state triumph for President Obama.

The New Yorker had a piece a week or two ago saying that he was the frontrunner -- to which my response is: get real.

Mike Huckabee has one thing going for him: He's by far the most likable candidate that the GOP has right now. But every time Huckabee talks about something substantive, he winds up on the scary extreme of an issue. (Fair tax? Really?) Or he invokes God in a way that would make George W. Bush blush. (He once credited divine intervention with his improving poll numbers.)

Yes, we might want a nice guy as our pastor. But do we trust him with America's economy? With wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? With serious problems like climate change and immigration? I think the answer would be a resounding no.

Tim Pawlenty. This would be the GOP equivalent of nominating John Kerry. He's a lot less crazy than Palin or Huckabee. But he is so lukewarm that very few people would be filling the streets to elect him president. There was a reason that John McCain didn't pick him to be his running mate.

I don't think Bobby Jindal is ready for prime time yet. Likewise, I think Scott Brown is, as of right now, no real threat. It's one thing to do very well in a special election, but to start running for president he'd have to do so in early 2011 and I just don't think he has spent enough time in the spotlight for that. (Although, similar things were said about President Obama -- so you never know.) The one candidacy that truly worries me is that of David Petraeus. It looks to me like Petraeus isn't very interested in running (and Obama might have neutralized this threat by asking him to take control of Afghanistan -- which might have been his greatest political trick yet) but if Petraeus turns around Afghanistan and announces his retirement next year, then President Obama should be worried. Otherwise, I think he just has to sit back and watch the GOP immolate itself.

A couple of thoughts about Sarah Palin

Andrew Sullivan is officially having a breakdown about Sarah Palin.

And with good reason.

I watched about 15 minutes or so of her address to the teabaggers last night, which was about all I could take. It was a speech of such willful distortion, and stunning arrogance that only a true believer could watch it with anything less than disgust.

If you want the real window into just how ignorant this person is, read Game Change. I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say that McCain's advisers predicted a meltdown during the debate with Joe Biden. She didn't know the difference between North and South Korea, or the basic facts about World War II and the Cold War. She was cramming to be Vice President on things that you're supposed to know coming out of high school. And when her debate prep started going badly, she just retreated into silence. (The advisers finally decided to make their best guesses on the questions she'd be asked and wrote out responses that she was made to memorize.)

The idea of this person rising to any position of power whatsoever is jaw dropping. (As dumb as George W. Bush is, I doubt very much that he didn't understand the difference between North and South Korea prior to debate prep.)

Another reason why Palin is doubly scary is that there's a teflon quality to her.

There were a number of things that she did during the campaign and its aftermath that would -- under normal circumstances -- be career killers. How does one recover from the babbling, incoherent mess of an interview that she gave to Katie Couric? That's the kind of withering moment (like, say, Dan Quayle's debate performance against Lloyd Bensen) that stays with a politician like a case of herpes.

Not Sarah Palin.

When you've been accused of being inexperienced, how does it make sense for your political future to walk away from a governorship before your first term is up? (It's not as though the 2012 election was coming up any time soon.) It was in the middle of scandals and criticism and dropping poll numbers. It looked like a suicide move.

And yet nobody cares amongst her national followers.

Unfortunately, populist demagogues like Sarah Palin have a history of getting extremely far in politics. Lack of experience, lack of knowledge, lack of anything actually useful in governing have little to do with their appeal. And for this reason, I, too am scared of Sarah Palin.

However, there are a couple of things to consider:

1) Palin has peaked early.

Part of the reason that Palin and the teabaggers are enjoying a run of national popularity has to do with the fact that the 2012 election is still two-and-a-half years off. The support is there because people do not have to make a real choice yet. When they do -- when the moment is upon them, when they're really thinking of who they're going to vote for -- I don't think it will be Sarah Palin. Are Americans really going to speed head first back into the Bush years? I find that somewhat difficult to believe.

2) Another blowup is inevitable.

I think that's a sort of risky way to think, but Palin is such a basketcase that I don't think it's such a stretch to think that several more bombs will go off over the next couple of years.

Can anything really destroy this woman? Well, we'll have to wait and see. But at a certain point, only so many bombs can go off before she starts looking like what she really is: A fraud. A person with nothing to offer America except identity politics bullshit. A person who wants power for the sake of power -- not someone who has any real ideas.

3) There's only so much time she can spend in the national spotlight before she has to produce ideas.

She wants to cut taxes, balance the budget and not touch any entitlements. It makes no sense. Granted, Bush got away with doing this for a very long time (minus the balancing the budget part), but let's not forget: Barack Obama is president of the United States. He has a very big microphone. Moreover, President Obama has the intellect and the courage to challenge her on this. When he is on the stump he will demand answers from her. Maybe she can get away with dodging forever, but I don't think Obama (or his advisers) will let her.

4) Her followers are loud, devoted and few in number.

Yes, I wish she had fewer followers. And, yes, there are regions of the country that revere her. And, I will even admit, the devotion is somewhat like the devotion towards President Obama on the left. But there is a crucial difference: Obama knew what he was doing. He lit a fire under his followers, but he also managed to convince the great middle that he was a serious person with smart solutions. I don't think Palin will ever have any appeal beyond the right wing.

So for all of those reasons, I think that Palin's rise to prominence will in all likelihood help Obama more than a guy like Mitt Romney who (unbearable asshole though he is) is at least a serious alternative. It's one thing to flirt with a woman like Palin. It's another thing to put a ring on her finger.

Game Change -- we can believe in

Wow.

For some reason I was skeptical about John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's book, Game Change... boy, was I wrong about that one.

I should say at the outset, that Game Change is a little like crack for political junkies. You will do nothing else for a couple of days, other than sit in your apartment, alone with your 448 pages of drug-like bliss, and ingest the words. You will not want to talk to people. You will not want to go out at night. You will only want to stay home and read. (I was up with it well past my bedtime.)

And you will be extremely distraught when it's over. You need your fix!

I'm going to avoid giving away too much. And, in a way, a lot of the ace material was in Heilemann and Halperin's excerpt about John Edwards in New York magazine a couple of weeks ago.... But there is so much more!

And there are three observations I would like to make:

1) I believe only about 80 percent of this stuff is exactly the way it happened.

It's sort of remarkable that given how much of the book was anonymously sourced, how little these two have had to retract. (Has there been anything?) Clearly, this is mostly the way it went down. But there's a reason why some of the little things could be wrong and not have been challenged.

If, say, Elizabeth Edwards had a quibble with only one or two little facts, she would look truly ridiculous disputing them when the vast majority of the narrative is true and so negative.

2) One of the criticisms I've heard of the book is that it's inside baseball -- there's no broader context.

So?

I mean, come on. Everybody was paying attention to this race. It was the most frustrating, exciting, drawn out damned race in American political history! True, if you didn't know any of the scandals that enveloped the 2008 political season -- from "sniper fire" to "bittergate" to the views of Russia from Alaska -- you might be at a loss, and maybe this book isn't for you. But H&H would have had to be completely meshuggenah to describe the campaign from soup to nuts.

No -- these guys got the narrative right.

3) As much as I love Obama, I accept the fact that there are reasons he's the only one coming out of this book smelling like a rose.

Truly, everybody looks bad in this book. And by everybody, I mean everybody. Some come out looking worse than others (the Edwardses probably come out looking the worst) but Bill, Hillary, McCain and Palin all look like the most dysfunctional people you'd ever want to cross paths with. And most of the staffs look pretty bad, too. (Mark Penn comes across as a true blue idiot.)

At times, it's a study in contrasts: Bill looks so much worse than Hillary, for instance. And Steve Schmidt, McCain's political guru, actually comes across decently. (Not that I agree with any of his positions on anything -- but he looks at least like a smart, organized guy who knows what he's doing.)

But the only two people who look semi-normal at the end of this twisted saga are Barack and Michelle Obama.

That didn't happen by accident.

I'm sure that the Obamas are marvelous people. I truly love them. But, my friend Robert George pointed out something important: Almost everybody else has a long history in Washington. And every single one of the principles (except the Palins) has run a national campaign before.

Being in politics that long (and at that level) means that you create enemies. There are plenty of people who have known the Clintons, the Edwardses and the McCains a long time and wanted to take swipes at them. Not so for the Obamas.

Plus, you can be damned sure that there were plenty of sources in the Obama camp.

But as I said: 80 percent true. Enjoy -- just don't OD.

Matthew Dowd is smoking crack

Former-George W. Bush speechwriter, Matthew Dowd, has either officially lost his mind, or has started smoking crack.

That's the only conclusion I can draw from his column in the Washington Post saying that Sarah Palin is a serious contender for the presidency in 2012. Dowd gives himself the necessary ass-covering disclaimers ("I agree that her success is not probable...") but the meat of his column is that Palin should not be written off.

Sorry, Matt. I'm not buying. No way, no how.

There are many reasons why this is true. And, I grant you, back in 1999 I didn't think there was a snowball's chance in hell that a dope as big as George W. Bush would be elected president. (Not that he really was elected -- but that's another discussion.) But let's just examine a few of his claims.

1) He says that according to Gallup polls, no president has been elected with an approval rating below 47 percent, and nobody above 51 has failed to be reelected.

So, in other words, if Obama is below 47, he's toast and it won't matter who's running against him.

Wrong!

What Dowd seems to miss is that the opposition candidate has a direct effect on the incumbent's approval rating.

I would argue that Bush would have never hit 50 percent in 2004 if the opposition candidate hadn't been such a fuckup. Say what you will about John Kerry (who I think was a decent, honorable man and would have made a better president than Bush) he ran an extremely shitty campaign. Disapproval of Kerry turned into approval of Bush.

Same thing would happen with Sarah Palin, if she ran. It would redound to Obama's credit.

The second thing that's wrong with this is the fact that he's operating under a very small sample. How many sitting presidents have been defeated since World War II? (Which is when Gallup started up.) Three. (George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.) How many have been reelected? Seven. (Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush.)

So, he's using 10 instances as his sample set.

Come on.

2) Dowd claims that if Palin wants to have a future run she should be act more seriously.

Wrong.

Right now Palin's negatives are extremely high. And she's already a known entity. (Love her or hate her, you have some feeling about her.) Something very dramatic would have to happen to get millions of voters to change their minds about her. (If, say, she saved a bus load of children from drowning or something. But I think it would have to be something that dramatic and that improbable.)

3) There's an underlying assumption that Obama's popularity will continue to deflate.

Wrong again.

Look, this hasn't been a good year for Obama's popularity. He inherited one hell of a big mess, and wading through it was always going to take a lot of time. Results weren't going to appear as quickly as we'd all like. Healthcare was always a fraught issue in American politics, and tackling it was going to sap some of his popularity. (Moreover, the Democrats should expect to lose seats in the house and senate next election.)

But Obama has given himself a lot of recovery time here. In 2012, healthcare will hopefully be law. And the nastiness of the teabaggers and their protests will be years in the past. Unemployment might not be great, but if the economy stays on track the numbers will be a lot better than they currently are.

In short, if Obama was going to pick a time to spend his political capital, he chose wisely.

4) Dowd says that Obama is a more polarizing figure than Clinton or Bush.

Oh, please!

Yes, the GOP has gone off into crazyland. I won't deny it. Congressmen shout at the president during an address. The President is compared to Hitler for trying to give sick people healthcare. So, yes, Obama's numbers within the GOP are perhaps worse than Clinton's.

But Dowd is forgetting something critical: The GOP has shrunk very dramatically in the last 8 years. Independents and Democrats have swelled. So if Obama is popular with Dems and Independents, it's not such a surprise that the GOP base (which has gone to an incredible extreme, to the point where they're purging conservatives who don't follow the strict party line) Obama would be extremely unpopular.

That does not make him as pollarizing a figure as George W. Bush.

What are you afraid of?

My conservative friend and sparring partner, Karol Markowicz, gave an interview with AM New York today urging Sarah Palin to skip NYC during her book tour.

Needless to say, Karol and I disagree strongly about Sarah Palin. (Karol once described her as her "homegirl." I describe her more as a schlemile. The back and forth on the comments section of Karol's article are worth reading.)

And I sort of see Karol's point. Sarah Palin probably isn't going to win many converts over here, and (if I were her) I probably wouldn't want the tsuris of having to deal with a bunch of people who hate me.

But there is one comment I would like to make:

If Palin really wants a future in the GOP, she has to broaden her appeal.

The Karl Rove theory of drumming up the base for victory worked on exactly one occasion: 2004. (Supreme Court decision or not, Bush still lost the popular vote in 2000.) And I would argue that it only worked under an extremely unusual set of circumstances. (Wake of 9/11; Iraq war; terrible campaign of John Kerry; etc.)

Ronald Reagan might have been a right wing radical who was wildly loathed by people on the left (including me), but he was an avuncular sort of radical who was greatly loved by most people in the center. There were things about Reagan that appealed to voters not just in Texas and Wyoming, but in New York and Massachusetts (all of which he won handily in 1980 and 1984.)

If Sarah Palin wants to simply play to the choir, she has a decent chance of winning the GOP nomination, and an all but certain chance of getting crushed in the general election.

Moreover, Palin's greatest problem is that nobody takes her seriously. Part of the reason people don't take her seriously is because she seems so detached from the intellectual underpinnings of her radicalism. A strong thinker should be able to stand up against a challenge. If you put Barack Obama in a debate with just about anybody else on the planet, 99 times out of 100 he'll win the debate. (He might not convince the person he's debating -- but he'll probably sway a neutral observer.)

Sarah Palin can't even stand up against that intellectual powerhouse Katie Couric, for chrissakes!

But I invite Sarah Palin to come to New York and convince me otherwise.

You betcha!

My beloved New York Post has a great scoop --

Apparently nobody is booking any $100,000 Sarah Palin speaking gigs.

The reason?

According to one industry expert:

"The big lecture buyers in the US are paralyzed with fear about booking her, basically because they think she is a blithering idiot."

Ah... Thought so many times -- never spoken so well.

The thriller from Wasilla

Well, that was weird.

Sarah Palin has resigned from the highest governmental position in the state of Alaska allegedly so she could do more for the state of Alaska.

If you're scratching your head over that one, you're not alone. We here at FSTS don't quite know what to make of it either.

But I think this much is probably certain. Sarah Palin is either:

(a) sitting on yet another major, major scandal that is about to blow.

(b) being advised by major, major idiots.

(c) both.

My first instinct was (c).

I don't think you can walk away from your first term as governor if you have national aspirations and not be sitting on something very, very toxic. The primary complaint against her during the campaign was how woefully inexperienced she is. How is that helped by leaving the executive office you have? It makes no sense -- unless she has to leave. She's already had 15 different ethics complaints. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if there's another one lurking somewhere -- and it's fatal.

However, if you read Todd Purdum's Vanity Fair piece this month about Palin, you get the sense that this is really, really not a bright woman. And that her primary advisor is her husband -- who is not a bright guy, either.

And, with most not-terribly-bright people, I suspect that she surrounds herself with lesser intellects and loyalists. (Like a certain President who recently left office.)

It just might be possible that someone in her circle said, "You would get so much more national exposure if you didn't have to run things up in boring old Alaska," and she said, "Hey, yeah! That's a great idea! All mavericky! I should just up and quit!"

And even though there are major players in the Republican establishment who want her to do well, it's pretty obvious from Purdum's article that she doesn't really know the Washington people. It would not surprise me at all that she didn't have a Congressional or party rabbi to run this by.

So, yes, it's possible that this was just a very, very stupid move.

In any event, R.I.P., Sarah Barracuda. Did you make things interesting? Oh, you betcha! [Wink!]

Schlepen zie to rehab...

Hey loyal readers --

In an effort to do a little FSTS promotion, I will be blogging for Jewcy this week. (If you don't know about it, it's a little like a Jewish version of Slate -- and one of the top editor dudes there is my good buddy Mike Weiss.)

So you might not see much original content here for the next week or so.

But I gave a somewhat lengthier argument for why Sarah Palin is a schlemile. ("I didn't think it was very convincing," said one of my colleagues at the Post.)

I have a little item on how Jerome Allen Seinfeld is clearly a threat to one and all.

I will shortly have up an item on why Barack Obama should listen to the Jewish mother inside all of us when he schedules a campaign rally in the rain.

And there will be much, much more!

In the meantime, I didn't want to blog on Jewcy about this, because it's sort of a rival publication -- but the Forward has one of the greatest videos I've ever seen up on the Bintel Blog. It's a rabbi singing Amy Winehouse's song Rehab in Yiddish!

Enjoy! (I sure as hell did.)

Sarah Palin: schlemile?

...That seems to be the contention in Judith Warner's op-ed in today's Times...

A mostly fair characterization.

As I'm sure my readers well know, the classic definition of a schlemile (going by the great Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish) goes something like this:

1) A foolish person; a simpleton. "He has the brains of a shlemile." [MPG: Rosten very rarely uses the "c" in his "sch" Yiddish words.]

2) A consistently unlucky or unfortunate person....

3) A clumsy, butterfingered, all-thumbs, gauche type...

4) A social misfit, congenitally maladjusted...

5) A pipsqueak, a Caspar Milquetoast...

6) A naive, trusting, gullible customer...

7) Anyone who makes a foolish bargain, or wagers a foolish bet....

Obviously, not all of these things fit precisely with Sarah Palin. I would be hard pressed to think that someone who has come so far on so little is in any way "unlucky" or "unfortunate." Quite the opposite.

Nor is Palin a social misfit -- if anything, her social status is her greatest strength. (Her only strength, when you get right down to it.)

But she certainly fits in with the first definition. And the third definition. And I think definitions five, six and seven are all debatable, but probably fair. (Certainly if you watch Tina Fey's portrayal.)

For a while, I was starting to feel somewhat sorry for the GOP veep nominee. She was clearly in way over her head -- and it made you wonder if she woke up every morning praying that this non-ending parade of ridicule and media scrutiny were just some dreadful nightmare.

Moreover, I thought that the worst you could say about her was that she didn't quite appreciate how unqualified she was. It's not easy being self-aware -- most people aren't -- and Palin clearly was not. That's not her fault, exactly. It's a reason to vote against her -- not to hate her.

That sympathy disappeared (as far as I was concerned) once she started winking at the cameras during the debates -- which made me want to vomit.

But I might have been more inclined to think of Palin as more schlemile like before her little "sunbursts" of love to the television audience.

From Rosten: "It is important to observe that shlemile, like nebech [nebbish], carries a distinctive note of pity. In fact, a shlemile is often a nebech's twin brother. The classic definition goes: 'A shlemile is always knocking things off a table; the nebech always picks them up.'"

Thomas would approve of Palin. Trust me.

The great Dahlia Lithwick has an article in Slate today about what Clarence Thomas thinks of Sarah Palin's VP nomination...

Based on Thomas' judicial philosophy, Lithwick seems to suggest, Thomas would disapprove of a Palin Vice Presidency as a sop to bringing diversity on the ticket. (Although, in true Slatey fashion, Lithwick never comes out and says anything decisive like, "Thomas would disapprove...".)

I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with that premise.

Few people are as fascinating to me (as full of contradiction, self hatred, anger and all the other dramatic elements) as Clarence Thomas. Unlike my fellow liberal snobs, I do not for a moment doubt Justice Thomas' intellect. The people who say that Thomas votes the straight Scalia line quite frankly don't know what they're talking about. Believe me, Thomas knows exactly what he thinks. And it is radically conservative -- probably more so than Antonin Scalia. (I have not read Thomas' memoir, My Grandfather's Son, but I highly recommend Jeffrey Toobin's great book, The Nine, for further discussion.)

Nor have I ever thought that Thomas was unqualified to sit on the bench. (When George H. W. Bush called him the "most qualified" man for the job, that was clearly not true. But he was no Harriet Miers. And much more qualified than some hack appointments over the years.)

My problem with Thomas is that his philosophy is insane.

A long time ago, Thomas made a decision that the right wing of the Republican Party was going to be his home and hearth, and that he would defend home and hearth with everything he has. Is there a philosophy that goes along with this? Sure. It's one of radical suspicion of the federal government and an all encompassing trust of local government. But Thomas is a smart enough guy to bend the philosophy to the law that suits the Republican Party every time (like, say, in national security matters).

What I think drew Thomas to the GOP was a true disgust with liberal snobs like me. (It's the same thing that ignited Richard Nixon's raging hatred of Democrats -- which Rick Perlstein details really well in Nixonland.)

For this reason, I have no doubt whatsoever that Thomas probably thought Sarah Palin was a brilliant pick. Like other arch-conservatives, Thomas favors the wisdom of the "common people." I'm sure that if Thomas ever met and had a discussion with Palin he would walk away thinking that she wasn't the brightest bulb in the world (I doubt any smart person could walk away with confidence in her) but that would not disqualify her, in his mind, from the presidency.

Conservatives have talked themselves into a very perverse position: Intelligence really doesn't matter for an executive. (The really weird part -- in my view -- is that this idea was mostly formed by conservative intellectuals.

I guess that this opinion was formed in part because everyone knew that Ronald Reagan wasn't the smartest guy in the world -- and conservatives view his presidency as a triumph. Moreover, the bar only got lower over the years with the arrival of Dan Quayle and George W. Bush on the national scene. (Of course, if you ask me, these guys look like Klemens freakin' Metternich in comparison to Sarah Palin.)

I think that Thomas would rush to her defense; the small town, common sense woman, beset by the jackals of the elite, who condescend to her because she is a woman. (Lithwick rightly points out that even though Thomas is fervently against affirmative action, he has never been shy about saying that racism has been a part of the reaction on behalf of his enemies.)

Sorry Dahlia -- I'm just not buying.

ImPalined

Not that most of this stuff wasn't floating around the internet and papers for those who were looking for it, but the Times has a great piece on the "new boys" network (or, maybe, "new girls" network) since Sarah Palin became governor. Definitely worth a look.

Also, Andrew Sullivan gives his take.

Alaskans for FSTS!

My friend Robert George says this of Sarah Palin's new son-in-law:

"Levi Johnston is now -- next to Seth Rogen -- the most famous guy to knock up a chick."

I never realized that... but it's true!

Does this mean a new market for From Schlub to Stud...? The backwoods Alaskan rednecks? (For the record, Levi Johnston is not a schlub... but I'm sort of curious as to how Johnston would view his schlubby Jewish counterpart, Rogen.)

Robert's post is worth reading in full. I wasn't quite so disgusted by seeing Mr. Johnston on the stage with the GOPers. I was more revolted by the way the Palin's Down syndrome child was passed from family member to family member in front of the cable news cameras. (One friend described it like "passing a bong around.")

Even in my Gross insensitivity, I couldn't quite believe that they would use a severely disabled infant as a political prop. But, then, I don't know why I continue to be surprised by Republican antics.

The great advantage of low expectations

On my way into work today, something a little frightening occurred to me...

Sarah Palin's disasterous first week might really redound to her credit in the debates against Joe Biden.

Let me explain: Back in 2000, everyone thought that George W. Bush was a sitting duck in the debates against Al Gore. There was no way that such a callow yutz as Bush was going to outshine a sitting vice president who had a sterling career as a senator and a vast reservoir of policy knowledge.

And then what happened? Bush walked away with it! For three debates!

Some said that Al Gore lost it because he came off as arrogant. (Which I think has a lot of merit. Watching it at home I winced after every sigh.) But I think Bush won it primarily because the media had set him up to fail. Because he didn't come off like a complete moron, those accusations of stupidity seemed thin. (Some, like the great James Fallows, insist that Bush is not a bad debater. But I'm not convinced.)

This might be exactly what happens with Sarah Palin.

A lot of people on the Democratic side are worried that Joe Biden might say or do something condescending to her in the debate that will endear her to female voters (think Rick Lazio). But I don't think so. First off, the Obama campaign is too smart not to have anticipated that. Biden will no doubt treat her with great respect. (And, besides, her debate is going to matter a lot less than the Obama versus McCain debate, anyway.) But if she can show some spunk and a basic mastery of detail, people will score it as a win.

Oy....

VP rejects sounding off...

Wouldn't you be pissed off if you got passed over for a pistol packin' hottie who has no qualifications, plenty of glaring flaws, and looks so much better in a swimsuit?

God, all the possible VP picks look so schlubby in retrospect...

Who?

McCain takes a stab at the Hillary vote by tapping Sarah Palin as his VP pick.

My first reaction was, "Who?"

Well... I have no idea how this pick is going to go down. But I have the feeling that she'll get a lot more scrutiny than Joe Biden -- given the fact that McCain is so old.

It was a pretty brazen political gimmick. But a smarter gimmick than I expected. Not that Palin is a particularly good candidate. But she's a hell of a lot better choice than Joe Lieberman, Mitt Romney or Bobby Jindal.

But here's something to hope for: Wouldn't it be great if McCain and Palin got entangled in an affair? Not that would be a presidential first...