My first impression that Palin’s veto of an anti-gay bill in Alaska would put off social conservatives was dead wrong (not a surprise, who understands social conservatives anyways?). They gave her a pass based on the fact that she vetoed it under protest and supports a litany of other anti-gay legislation (including the very bill she vetoed!), plus of course the all important abortion question (I swear, social conservatives seem to think the only things wrong with the country are gay people and abortions). Seems Palin has shored up McCain’s credibility with social conservatives, but is that necessarily what McCain needs? The vast majority of social conservatives will come around to supporting the GOP pick in the end. Oh sure, they’ll whine about not having a better choice, but you don’t need to look further than Sen. Brownback numbers to see that they’ll happily simply ignore the existence of one of their own if it means the difference between winning and losing. Simply put, they vote for whoever the GOP gives them. But it’s not unreasonable to suppose that McCain won the nomination, in part, thanks to NOT being a darling of the social conservatives. Putting a staunch social conservative on the ticket may win him a vote or two from the extreme social conservatives who might have otherwise stayed home, but just how many votes will he lose from the Independents or moderate Republicans (who likely gave him the nomination in the first place), by hopping on board the social conservative bandwagon (perhaps George W. Bush saved him a seat?)?

It seems like the GOP has caught on to the fact that Palin effectively obliterates the argument that Obama isn’t experienced enough. Since that’s pretty much the basis of their entire campaign, the new talking point aimed at hanging on to that little sound-byte is that she has more executive experience than Obama and Biden put together. If that’s the route they are going though, seems to me they’re omitting one important fact. McCain has no more executive experience than Obama or Biden. If you buy that executive experience is all that matters, that leaves the top of the GOP ticket worthless. At least Obama has the youthful/fresh-face/change thing going for him (that was what Palin was supposed to bring to the GOP ticket). If executive experience is the only experience that matters, that leaves McCain with NOTHING to run on and he’s the guy they’re actually running for President! Not smart. If you’re going to try to make your argument work by changing the definition of “experience,” you might want to first look at see how such a change effects your guy.

As for the stuff about her pregnant daughter, I don’t really care. At best, it’s an anecdote about the inefficacy of abstinence-only sex education; at worst it’s a big pile of schadenfreude. The only part of it that is moderately interesting (though not surprising) to me is the right-wing response to it. Can you imagine the venom that would have been directed at the child of a unmarried teen Democrat? I mean, it wasn’t even that long ago that Dan Quayle took TV character Murphy Brown to task for having a child out of wedlock and she wasn’t even a teen or, you know, a real person. God forbid it be a teen child of Barack Obama’s having the child, or we may even be treated to hearing all about how such a thing is the result of “black culture.” No, the families of politicians should be off-limits (the same way they should have been when the GOP attacked Michelle Obama earlier this year), and the children of the candidates doubly so. That said, those who are NOT off-limits are the hypocrites who once cited Rush Limbaugh as a poor soul who needed our support as he struggled with the disease of addiction while simultaneously arguing for locking up young black kids who get involved in drugs. And those same people are doing it again.