But they did it through a very special white lady.
Now that John McCain's campaign is winding down into a sad shadow of Bob Dole's former self, it's time to wonder: how best to protect Sarah Palin from the terrible, terrible mistake that was John McCain's presidential run?
The first step is to declare that this entire "running for president" nonsense demeans her.
The complaint against the Alaska governor, at its most basic, is that she doesn't qualify for admission to the national political fraternity. Boy, that's rich. Behold the shabby frat house that says it's above her pay grade.
Congress has the lowest approval rating ever registered in the history of polling (12%!). She isn't the reason polls are showing people want the entire Congress fired, with many telling pollsters they themselves could do a better job.
Sarah Palin didn't design a system of presidential primaries whose length and cost ensures that only the most obsessional personalities will run the gauntlet, while a long list of effective governors don't run.
These rules have wasted the electorate's time the past three presidential elections, by filling the debates with such zero-support candidates as Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Al Sharpton, Duncan Hunter, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden (8,000 total votes), Wesley Clark and Alan Keyes.
This is so stupid as to beggar words. The half-term governor of Alaska, who chose to accept John McCain's invitation to be on the ticket, is suffering from the injustice of a system that didn't make it clear that her prodigious talents of holding guns, wearing jackets and hating knowledge were exactly what about 30% of a nation in need was desperately crying out for. Simply put, the system was gamed against people like her by virtue of the fact that crazy elves and massive xenophobes decided to run for a position she didn't want.
That's the warmup, though. After you declare her the victim of an awful process, you then turn her into the greatest victim the world has ever known, with a life so terrible that Barack Obama would crumble to dust. Let's learn more:
I have a dream for Sen. Barack Obama.I have a dream that one day, for just 24 hours, he could be Sarah Palin.
OK, maybe that’s less of a dream and more a plot point from a bad Lindsay Lohan movie (redundancy alert!).
That is a lame joke for two reasons: Lindsay Lohan is no longer famous enough for a movie to be a "Lindsay Lohan" movie, and of all the things to make an "I Have A Dream" joke about with regards to our first black president...a dream that he's a white woman? Really?
But imagine the Democratic nominee’s day as Barack Palin Obama:
He wake up and reaches for a secret cigarette and a copy of The New York Times [NYT]. Instead of the usual partisan puff pieces (“Obama Health Care Plan Pledges Miraculous Healings For All”), the Times is running exposes about his family.
Does his spouse have extremist political views? Who pays when his kids travel to Washington? And how do we know one of them isn’t really his grandkid?
Or he could, you know, pick up the New York Post and find all of those stories. I mean, I'm not sure where this guy has been, but the idea that nobody's gone after Michelle Obama (for far less than belonging to a secessionist political party) is just stupid. And nobody's run stories about him using federal funds to fly his family around because he hasn't done that. Imagine if Sarah Palin lived in a terrible world where the news kept talking about if she was a Muslim!
Opening the editorial page Palin-Obama finds column after column filled with personal attacks and insults. Comments about his looks, how much his clothes cost, his speaking style - even suggestions that the radical teachings of his church might be a legitimate topic for discussion.
That drive-by media, with its fourteen stories on Sarah Palin's church and its months of coverage of Jeremiah Wright. The injustice! To Sarah Palin!
I'm not even halfway through this column, and I'm realizing that it was written without a.) irony and b.) any knowledge of what happened before that shiny thing went by ten minutes ago.
He clicks on MSNBC and sees the spittle-flecked face of Chris Matthews.
“Obama says he’s cutting taxes for 95 percent of taxpayers, but he’s not. He’s just sending them checks! No cut in their tax rate AT ALL! IT’S A LIE, A LIE! AAARRGGHHHH!"
Or he could click on Fox News and see a fucking anti-Semite getting uninterrupted screen time to call him a terrorist. That shit's ridiculous, though.
As the MSNBC medical staff fires yet another tranquilizer dart into Matthews’ thrashing body, Palin-Obama gets ready to face the day.
At the airport, Palin-Obama is under siege from the traveling press. “Why are you hiding, Sen. Obama? You haven’t taken questions from us since last month. Joe Biden hasn’t held a press avail since Sept. 7! Afraid he’ll make another ‘guaranteed crisis’ comment? How many more screw-ups before you dump the guy?”
And then, since he's Palin-Obama, he answers, "That is a question such that I could not answer it without, you know, the justice necessary for and loyalty, also." And then he falls over and sucks his thumb in the fetal position, because his life is awful.
A crowd of thousands gathers to hear him speak. When Palin-Obama mentions the “destructive foreign policy of George W. Bush,” someone shouts “murderer!” Another cries, “off with this head!”
By lunchtime, the cable news headline is: “Obama Whips Up Angry Mob, Some Fear Campaign May Inspire Violence.”
By dinnertime, the cable news headline is: "Why Did An Obama Supporter Ask For Self-Decapitation In Public?"
That afternoon, Palin-Obama sits down with a CNN reporter who spends the first half of the interview asking variations of the question, “How can a half-term senator with zero executive experience and no record of achievement be president? Shouldn’t you be ashamed of yourself for even running?”
“Let’s talk energy independence,” Palin-Obama asks hopefully. The reporter instead demands to know why Obama won’t release his medical records, his original birth certificate or the names of about half his contributors.
“You’re the most secretive candidate since Nixon,” the reporter insists. “And besides, the guy who plays you on ‘Saturday Night Live’ is way hotter.”
And then the fantasy explodes, because that is a goddamn dirty lie.
The day grinds on. False stories repeatedly corrected by the campaign continue to air. One Palin-Obama supporter - a plumber who asked John McCain a tough question at a campaign stop - had his private medical files hacked into, and found Candy Crowley hiding in his dumpster.
One more campaign stop, more questions about his wife’s politics, his children’s travel schedule and his clothing budget - and Palin-Obama finally reaches his hotel for a night’s rest.
His nightmare of misreporting, mean-spirited negative attacks and blatant media bias is over. For Gov. Sarah Palin, it’s going to last at least 12 more days.
For Barack Obama, it's another 12 days of mani-pedis courtesy of Wolf Blitzer and gentle reacharounds from the camera pool.
Can I just point out one thing here? If Barack Obama's black ass had pulled a quarter of the shit Palin pulls in a week, he would be a national joke. Not a ha-ha on Saturday Night Live joke, but a would-not-be-welcome-in-the-party-and-would-not-be-invited-to-run-in-2010 joke. Imagine if a woefully unprepared black politician from a large urban area, bearing the distinctive linguistic hallmarks of his adopted hometown, was put on a ticket and didn't know what his job entailed, said that he was prepared to engage internationally because he could see Canada from the northern edge of Illinois and routinely told boldfaced lies about the one thing he was supposed to have done in office. Not only would he be laughed out of every room he was in, it would set black candidates nationwide back years, if not decades.
Alas, Sarah Palin is a different creature - and one who, above all else, must be maintained as the victim so that she can come back in 2012 and flame out before South Carolina gets the chance to reject her.
