Sarah Palin is just like Alan Keyes.
Though both are right-wing extremists unqualified to be the vice presidential nominee of any major party, that's probably not the first thing you thought when you heard the shocking news of McCain's veep selection perhaps not that long after you woke up this morning trying to come back to earth following Obama's exhilarating speech last night.
I'll admit that wasn't the first thing that jumped in my mind. My first thought was what would the Hillary voters do and my first instinct was to panic, I admit.
It wasn't until I thought about what happened the last time Barack Obama delivered a highly-acclaimed speech at a Democratic convention -- and how the GOP reacted -- that I made the connection and in doing so got at least a bit of peace of mind.
Last week as we watched the AMAZING and WONDERFULLY unifying Democratic convention last week and while there were many moments I found inspiring and moving during the week, none were as gratifying as Barack Obama's nomination acceptance speech.
Sure, perhaps the tone and texture of the 2004 speech might have been more poetic... but for the setting, for this moment, for this campaign I truly believe Obama hit it out of the stadium last night in his address seen by more people than the opening ceremony of the Olympics or the finale of American Idol.
The McCain campaign team also must have found Obama's speech and the Democratic convention as a whole devastatingly powerful, for if they hadn't I don't think they would have found it necessary for McCain to bring a woman he had met only ONCE before last week to the lower 48 and seriously entertain the idea of naming her his veep choice, which when revealed would have the most conservative of his party enthralled while many pundits scratch their heads, Democrats just sort of laugh and many regular voters recoil at the absurdity and explicitly cynical tokenism inherent in the choice.
Did you know the same sort of thing happened in Obama's last election?
It's true that Obama's original general election opponent in his 2004 senate race, Jack Ryan, announced he was quitting the race and Obama was up pretty big in the polls in Illinois even before the nation was introduced to the son of a Kenyan and a Kansan and Illinoisans burst with pride seeing one of their own celebrated as one of the finest orators in the country.
But it wasn't until AFTER that speech in Boston that a confused, demoralized and ideologically divided GOP central committee came together (well as together as they could) to reach the bizarre and ultimately disastrous decision to appoint Maryland resident Alan Keyes to be the Illinois Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in 2004.
Why did they do this? The only possible explanation is they simply didn't know how to run a campaign against the phenomenon that is Barack Obama so they turned to some strange identity politics, decided to purge the moderates and common sense Republicans from their party and looked for an extremely outside the box pick to try to reset things in the election or at least not embarrass their party too badly.
In 2004, the Illinois GOP failed on both counts with their selection of Alan Keyes.
And I think in 2008, the national GOP will fail on both counts with their candidate Sarah Palin for V.P.