Joe Sixpack snubs Sarah Palin

Doggone it, if it weren't for that George W. Bush, America would be head-over-heels for Sarah Palin.

They're both plain folks, who play up their folksy accents that are just as American as all get-out. Their unflinching, moral absolutist vision of the world is distilled into simple sound bites, unlike some snooty, professorial Harvard-types, Barack. They tap into our hopes and especially fears because they "don't blink" or ever "wave the white flag of surrender" to terrorists.

In this "American Idol" era, we're supposed to go for the guy we can chug a beer with or the gal we can giggle with over a skinny mocha latte.

But not this time.

Why? Been there, done that.

We've already rolled the dice on a president with a fatal allergy to intellectual curiosity, demanding only "yes" men who won't challenge his chillingly narrow view of the world. We tried likeable and down-home and wound up with war(s?) we cannot win, a $10 trillion debt and an economy that bears more than a casual resemblance to the one Herbert Hoover bequeathed to us in the 1930s.

So, ya know, we're kinda sayin' "thanks, but no thanks" to that sweet Sarah Palin.

As Joe Biden's mother might say, "God love her," but this ain't amateur hour, kiddies.

But this raises a more important question: How can we trust John McCain when he's willing to entrust the country he loves so deeply with someone so inexperienced and unintellectual?

That fancy-pants know-it-all Obama doesn't seem like such a bad guy to steer us through a financial meltdown no one seems to comprehend. As conservative icon Charles Krauthammer ruefully observes, the Democrat has a "first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president."

He won't lurch from stunt to stunt, as McCain jarringly has for his entire campaign. And Obama doesn't need flash cards to solve the crisis, like Palin brought to her debate last week.

Afterward, the talking heads (those evil Eastern elites) were convinced Joe Sixpack would go as ga-ga for Palin as they did, because the pretty lady said "Joe Sixpack," "hockey mom" and the Reagan classic, "There you go again."

We didn't. Why? Americans are smarter than a fifth grader. We do value substance over style. The fact that she can only spout scant talking points on the bailout and doesn't grasp McCain's position on Pakistan bothers us. That's why every poll showed Biden wiped the floor with her.

Deflated conservatives still insist the self-proclaimed Sarahcuda is connecting with Main Street Americans. Dozens of polls say otherwise; she can't win over women or independents.

No matter. Her flinty winks literally sent hard-up right-wingers like Rich Lowry into a fit of embarrassing ecstasy, mooning over the "little starbursts" he felt through the teevee. Ahem.

Sarah should have been the perfect focus-grouped candidate, down to the effortless way she drops her g's and winks at you (only you). The GOP couldn't have built a better veep if they'd finagled some of that sci-fi-style cloning technology the pro-life loonies warn will take over Michigan if the pro-embryonic stem cell Proposal 2 passes.

Palin would have killed in the heyday of Newt Gingrich, as the apple-cheeked, high-heeled embodiment of gun-totin' rugged individualism. But now we're back to the era of big government, aided by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The country has changed, snapping back to the middle and even (gasp!) the left.

For too many years, we've plucked presidential candidates with criteria fit for a glitzy Hollywood biopic, not the leader of the free world. That was part of the problem with John Edwards, a coiffed empty suit whom desperate Democrats projected their hopes and dreams onto because he came in a slick, Southern-fried wrapper.

On the campaign trail, Palin brings the heat to a movement running cold. "This is not a man who sees America as you and I do - as the greatest force for good in the world," she drawls (rhetoric that incited one cultured fan to shout, "Kill him!")

She's warned us. Obama "pals around with terrorists" and will maniacally raise our taxes. We know blood will be on our hands.

And yet, a clear majority of us are planning to vote for him. She doesn't do it for us.

Palin will soon be relegated to irrelevance, perhaps the de facto leader of the far-right fringe of a party teetering on the brink of combustion. That's why David Brooks calls her brand of anti-intellectual populism a "fatal cancer to the Republican party."

I hope it eats the party alive so it reverts back to the civil spirit of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower. But instead of looking backward to '80s-style solutions, the young Turks will have to embrace a 21st century realism to the staggering problems ahead.

Palin can serve as a parable for the dangers of always choosing glib politics over good policy. She can invigorate the GOP, perhaps by destroying it as Democrats take both houses of Congress, the White House, most governor's mansions and more state and local seats across the country.

And for that, let's salute ya, Sister Sarah.

A party of whiners

Republicans have become wusses. Next thing you know, they'll want to cuddle.

I came of political age in the Newt Gingrich era, and the right-wingers I knew were bold and brash. They didn't talk about their feelings or make excuses. They swore on Adam Smith's soul that the world would be a better place with lower taxes, less regulation and a Deringer in every home.

Frankly, they were a lot more fun to hang out with that the liberals who screeched that calling grown women "girls" was a hate crime and believed the notorious Antioch College edict requiring students to ask permission before engaging in each new act of love ("May I bite your navel?") was sound public policy Congress should consider.

So I never thought I'd see that day when the GOP would become the poster child for Affirmative Action and political correctness.

What a letdown.

As Wall Street collapses into free-fall, violence amps up in Afghanistan and gas shoots up north of $4 again, whiny conservatives are carrying on about cosmetics.

If you have a pulse and occasionally click on cable news, you know that Barack Obama used the shopworn political phrase, "lipstick on a pig," last week.

Former acting Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift shrieked Sexism, noting that because GOP veep pick Sarah Palin talks about slathering on lipstick, she must be the porker in question.

"Often times, you're responsible for your words even if they're misconstrued," sniffed Ms. Swift, who ironically was broomed by the GOP establishment to make way for Mitt Romney, whom I understand is male.

It was as if I was transported back in time to my too-serious, abstractly academic women's studies classes and our insufferable debates over whether the word "history" (get it, "history"?) was misogynistic. That was the point at which the resident Republican would sanely chime in with an, "Oh, please!"

But the humorless, hypersensitive train barreled on after "Saturday Night Live" skewered both Palin and Hillary Clinton. Fired Hewlett-Packard CEO and John McCain adviser Carly Fiorina panned Tina Fey's dead-on impression of the Alaska guv ("I can see Russia from my house!") as (what else?) Sexist.

In another ironic twist, the feisty Fiorina got the hook Wednesday after she declared Palin (and McCain, because she is not Sexist) didn't have the gonads to head a major corporation. But she hastily added they could run the good old U.S. of A. (What everyone seems too polite to say is that Carly couldn't run a company either, though she was rewarded with a $21 million golden parachute for trying).

Palin herself hasn't cried Sexism, since she avoids the evil elite media's meanie questions like the plague. Instead, she allows others to wallow in victim feminism for her.

Since when do Republicans, especially those who proudly compare themselves to pitbulls, dodge a fight, especially with weenies in the press?

Meanwhile, every conservative in America, down to uber-reactionary U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg of Tipton (who I believe is still undecided on women's suffrage), is repeating the talking points that Palin is supremely qualified because she has "executive experience."

Folks, let's just take a time-out for a second.

Can you really say that someone who was mayor of a town of 6,700 and governor for 20 months of a state with 670,000 souls (.02 percent of the U.S. population) should be a heart attack away from taking over as leader of the free world? Don't you think the VP should know the Bush Doctrine or have an elementary grasp of the financial markets?

Let's call this what it is: Affirmative Action run amok, shunting expertise or even basic competence in favor a focus-grouped new face who plays well on tee-vee. I know of no other politician who has so breathtakingly blown an interview as Palin did on ABC and survived. Obama would have been laughed off the national stage.

Don't Palinistas feel a wee bit silly attacking Charles Gibson as Sexist for doing his job? Don't they ever tire of defending St. Sarah because McCain chose her and the Maverick is infallible?

Joe Lieberman, McCain's almost veep, gave a rather Freudian answer when initially asked if Palin was qualified to be president.

"Well, let's assume the best," he laughed nervously. "John's in great shape."

The truth is, the GOP is a party in the throes of a full-blown identity crisis, forced to disown its once beloved and now wildly unpopular President Bush and his disastrous economic and foreign policy agendas. Gone is the swagger, the supreme confidence of the Contract with America signatories, replaced by defensive, desperate thought police bleating about the unfairness of it all.

They sound like ... Democrats.

Maybe right-wingers should admit that their merciless (and amusing) ridiculing of Barackstar, who parted the Rocky Mountains for a crowd of 84,000 adoring disciples, was jealousy, plain and simple.

"The presidential election isn't a popularity contest!" they'd dourly declare.

But as soon as superfine, superstar Sarah glided on stage, they suddenly had a reason to turn out in droves and scream, "Drill, baby, drill!"

Not that there would be any double entrendre there. That, my friends, would be Sexist.