Please, make fun of Palin
Attention all those who want to defeat McCain-Palin: please ridicule Sarah Palin. Five kids with silly white trash names! She was the mayor of a small town! Ha! I mean, look at her — she must be dumb! And where did she go to school? I mean, come on! I mean, is McCain serious? What a joke. Her mere existence is an insult to women. She eats moose, she rides a snowmobile, and she supports drilling.
Serious people, incidentally, don’t support drilling: serious people support clean-coal-powered automobiles built by un-outsourcable American workers, each of which will be available at subsidized prices to all Americans. I mean, everybody knows that. Come on.
It goes on like that for a while. Well worth your time.
But his deeper point is an excellent one. If you want to ensure that middle America types aren’t going to vote for Barack Obama, the best way to do it is insult one of their own. Palin is essentially an impossible pick for Obama supporters to attack. You can’t attack her on experience without opening up Obama to withering questions of his own experience. You can’t attack her as a rube without alienating large swathes of the mid-west/mountain states. You can’t attack her for being a woman without alienating the already ticked off Hillary voters.
As Reihan points out in a follow up post, it’s easy to make fun of McCain. But I think Palin’s going to be pretty much off limits. She’s going to have a relatively easy time of things, if I had to guess (certainly from the Dems if they know what’s good for them, probably from the press as well)–what better way for her to get her sea legs over the next two months?