The Empress's New Clothes

… if voters aren't turned off by Palin's many other egregious missteps, I doubt a stack of designer receipts will sway many minds. And really, should it?

No, it won’t. And no, it shouldn’t. This story is something to write about given the lack of anything else.

Like it or not, the long Democratic primary season released everything there is about Obama. Hillary did a bigger favor to Barack than I think anyone gives her credit for. Ayers, ACORN, Rezko, Wright all yesterday’s news. McCain can try what he likes in bringing it up now, but all of us have heard it before. We heard the questions asked, we heard the answers, we’re satisfied. We heard it ad nausea then. The media was all over it. Maybe Republicans weren’t paying as much attention then, but the rest of us were, Democrats and independents. That’s why we aren’t interested now. We decided we could forgive or forget those associations.

Because that’s what everyone has to do, regardless of whom they are supporting. Politicians don’t become who they are without making some bad associates or some bad decisions. What we the voters have to decide is whose sins are more or less acceptable. And everyone needs to understand what judgments they are making by doing this. Yes, a tenuous connection with someone like Ayers is not as big a deal to me as the fully unethical behavior of the Keating 5; flipping on every major issue in the last eight years in an obviously opportunistic manner; and picking an unqualified person as his VP in a blatant and cynical pander to Hillary supporters (like we’d really rally to someone from the fundy Christian right).

McCain and Palin aren’t throwing up new ideas nor are they making their policy proposals sound viable. What they are doing isn’t resonating with anyone except those who wouldn’t vote for Obama even if he literally turned water into Bud Light right in front of their very eyes.

Then McPalin hands us the perfect piece to fill up the time. My obsessive attention to the news during election cycles allowed me to literally watch the evolution of this story. It started in the blogs and stayed there until the furor became so great the MSM had to at least report that it was being reported upon. And it’s a damn good selling headline. The populist Jane Six Pack in Tahiri. The woman who claims real Americans only live in small towns sporting Valentino like a New York City society dame. The hockey mom sporting designer labels people only know about because of Oscar night.

That and the fact that McCain isn’t giving the media anything new to report on. They’re sounding the same old tired sound bites while Obama is kicking off foreign policy summits. They don’t realize that people, in quite possibly electing the first black president, understand that the low-income employees at ACORN trying to make quota are surely not the most egregious example of voter fraud in the history of this country. His very skin reminds us of what real voter fraud and suppression is.

What is McCain giving them other than Caribou Barbie’s latest antics? He cries that Obama is a socialist, which the MSM dutifully reports, but upon further investigation it turns out that McCain is for some even more socialist programs than Obama’s progressive tax distribution (a position that McCain once supported himself). Fake Virginians, fake Americans, and I guess anti-Americans are actually voters too no matter how much Palin wishes we weren’t.

So don’t blame the media for a hot story that has people clicking through slideshows. McCain and Palin need to provide something new. And if the only new thing they provide costs $150,000 at Needless Markup, well, they have no one to blame but themselves.