Before the debate was over, I felt like I was watching Legally Blonde III: The Campaign, during which spunkiness triumphs over substance again.
Palin likes to play the Joe Sixpack Everyman card, and there is no doubt this multi-tasking mother of five knows more about what is going on in the average American family than any of the men on either ticket. She gets it because she lives it.
Women are saying this is the reason they like her. She is one of us.
But I don't want anybody like me to be vice president.
I want an Ivy League education. Maybe a Rhodes scholarship. How about a law degree or an MBA or a divinity degree? I want military service or a career in corporate or government leadership or in the diplomatic corps.
These are really scary times, and I want leaders with solid-gold resumes. I want intellectual heft. I want somebody way smarter than me.
I am not elitist, I am nervous. And I don't want as vice president a car-pooling mom who runs a state like a part-time job and who can't find her way from a subject to a predicate.
I want somebody who can do more than find 50 ways to use maverick in a sentence. I want somebody who can actually pitch in and help the next president find his way out of wars on two fronts, a recession and a health care crisis - just for starters.
And if her televised interviews and her debate performance are any indication, Palin's not up to the newly defined role of vice president as co-general manager of the country, even if she is taking a Cheney-like role in attacking Barack Obama as a terrorist.
Her chirpy meandering through the issues reminds me of Cher in the classroom debate on television violence in the movie Clueless:
"Until mankind is peaceful enough not to have violence on the news, there's no point in taking it out of shows that need it for entertainment value."
As if.
We are in the middle of an economic meltdown that could very well sink the Republican ticket all by itself, and all I can think is that if McCain loses, everybody is going to blame Sarah Palin.
If that happens, it could be a lifetime before a woman is on a national ticket again, and whether or not she is fodder for good Saturday Night Live skits will be part of the vetting process.
Maybe we will get lucky, and if McCain loses, everybody will blame Tina Fey.
