I haven't been posting much here about the national campaign; I figured out long ago that there are hundreds of thousands of other blogger voices out there to fill that void. But Salon.com has a new article that's interesting and I think raises some important issues. If you haven't noticed, John McCain's campaign quite brilliantly stole the show out from under the Convention's feet by leaking the identity of his VP choice at the same time as Obama's acceptance speech (which, if you haven't seen, please do).

If you've been hiding under a rock somewhere in Mongolia, then you might not be aware that he chose a female Governor of Alaska with virtually no political experience to be his VP running mate. Sarah Palin has been governor of Alaska for only two years, and before that was a mayor of a town with a population of about 5,000. Now, this selection is total baldface political opportunism. McCain is trying to cash in on the allegedly numerous Democrats embittered by Hillary Clinton's losing battle for the nomination. My grandmother from Georgia, for instance, who was a staunch Clinton supporter and refuses to vote for Obama. But she's not looking for a woman to vote for, per se. I think she's probably just not ready to imagine a Black President (God bless her, she still says "colored"). McCain won't win her vote by selecting Palin; she probably just won't vote come election day (though I certainly hope she changes her mind).

But I digress. Palin's pick is the lowest of the low kind of tokenism. She is not an experienced or savvy politician. Here's Salon.com:

Palin is the epitome of tokenism, exactly what conservative Republicans have always claimed to scorn, until today, as the politics of quotas and political correctness. Even Rush Limbaugh is a feminazi now (at least until Election Day).

But if Palin's résumé is limited, to put it politely, she possesses the only two qualities that McCain now seems to consider essential: She is a right-wing religious ideologue with female gender characteristics. Suddenly that is all anyone needs to qualify as a potential commander in chief of the world's most powerful military. We probably won't hear so much from now on about "experience" and "judgment," McCain's vaunted standard for the presidency until ... today. We certainly won't hear again about the "person most prepared to take my place," the phrase he has used more than once to describe his main criterion for a running mate.

I sincerely hope that there aren't more than a handful of voters out there who will suddenly be lured by this obvious bait. I have my doubts. Palin's no Clinton by any measure. Let's hope Americans aren't so blind.