I love her! She's so...FOLKSY!!!

Moosemom: "Hey, can I call you Joe?"

Me: "Oh, crap. 'Hey, can I call you Joe?'"
Mel: "Huh? Did she say that?"
Me: "Yeah."
Mel: "'No, bitch, you can call me 'Senator'.' What the hell is wrong with her?"
Me: "She's going to refer to him as 'Joe' condescendingly at some point."


Eventually, Moosemom broke out "say it ain't so, Joe."

I can't believe those buffoons went to all that trouble to orchestrate that one pathetic line, to the extent that her single-minded mission at the outset was to charge out there and get permission to call him Joe.

I fully expect to see numerous campaign ads relying on that line in the coming weeks.

I fear that Palin was incredibly effective reaching the audience that she was brought on to appeal to, and that isn't just evangelicals or just the base.

I hate to even use the term, but it's the easiest way to explain it: Reagan Democrats.

And Palin appealed to those voters in ways strikingly reminiscent of Red Ink Ronnie: she exhibited a healthy disdain for "the mainstream media", and emphasized her desire to circumvent the pundits and connect directly with the American people; she "spoke plainly" and bucked the system a little by answering the questions she wanted to answer, instead of the ones that were asked (and without much sophistry: she was very direct); and, obviously, all of that spills from a "down home" bottle.

Hell, when she addressed the issue of here statement 'I don't have any idea what the Vice President does', I found her candor charming and likable. "That was my lame attempt at a joke - I guess people didn't get it." (Beyond a couple of isolated moments such as that, though, I found her extremely grating.)

Like her style or not, the voters inhale plates full of it, and nearly knock each other down trying to get back to the buffet for more of it. They can easily ignore the risk of salmonella or e coli, and the massive amounts of LDL and trans fat, because it's yummy and it just keeps coming.

Of course, she's at the bottom of the ticket, and the wisdom supposedly is that the voting is really based on the top spot. I hope that's true, and I hope that "oh, crap, she's like a young Reagan" instinct proves to have missed the real points of how the electorate will react to her in total.

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