Worst Nightmare

For a while now it has been bothering me a bit that Governor Palin reminds me of someone...

And then last night during the VP debate it came to me in a flash - she's an amalgam of all my worst nightmares from two decades of working in advertising and PR. 

The sort of well-presented individual for whom connecting with the audience - 'getting the chemistry right' - is vastly more important than having some depth in their grasp of subjects about which it is fairly important for them to be properly knowledgeable. 

The kind who can keep an ickily insincere smile in place as they discourse forcefully, if without genuine passion, on matters safely within their comfort zone - and have a practiced knack for steering discussions back there whenever they seem prone to wander into trickier territory.

Biden may be a bit old school, but he appeared throughout last night's debate at Washington University to have access to factual information that he hadn't picked up in the last few days.  

And he could easily have been rougher with her - by pointing our her creationist credentials and the fact that her own track record up in Alaska indicates that she is anything but tolerant of diversity - yet such is the state of American politics that this would probably have lost him points overall. Instead he ended up playing the role of indulgent uncle. 

Heck, by the end of the debate I was even beginning to feel sorry for her myself. Hick charm works, darnnit.