Sarah Palin votes in jeans.  I just have to say it: she is so much hotter dressed as a normal person than she is glammed up.

As I write this, Obama’s winning.  It’s depressing and unless Obama falls in love with being President we are in for a rough four years.  Of course, as that article argues, McCain’s presidency with a Dem-led Congress would have been pretty bad anyway.  The only reason I wanted McCain to win, apart from McCain’s bad judges being better than Obama’s worse judges, was to have Palin preparing for 2012.

I want a Palin presidency.  Badly.  This year, Romney was the best of the bunch and he was still only a “pretty good” candidate.  Then the 10 gun-fighting rabbits took each other out (or in Giuliani’s case, shot himself in the foot with the starter pistol) and the low-lying tortoise who survived was convinced that this qualified him for the Olympic games.  I HAD to vote for McCain tonight, and no way was I going to not vote.  But until he picked Sarah Palin, I sure understood the desire of many other conservatives to just stay home.

If McCain has lost, then surely some will convince themselves that McCain’s choice of Palin is what sank him.  [UPDATE: He has lost, and commenters are already saying this.]  Anyone concluding that is nuts.  Palin is the only thing that kept this race close.  Palin should have been running his campaign, not getting handled by a bunch of fidgety image-brokers who wanted to make her beltway-acceptable.   Take Palin out of this race and McCain wouldn’t have even come close in the Popular vote.

The treatment of Palin deserves a buttload of post-election analysis and introspection.  A female candidate enters the race, and suddenly we’re told what her expenses were for new clothes, hair and make-up. Sure, $150,000 is a lot, but if we’re not told what Hillary, Michelle Obama, Laura Bush and Cindy McCain spend on the same how do we know it’s extravagant?  Of course, those are just the wives, but it’s hardly fair to compare Sarah Palin to guys who can get by with the same suits and ties.  And it’s worth mentioning that Sarah didn’t HAVE a fancy wardrobe already and needed one in order to not look unfashionable compared to the wealthy Michelle Obama.  I think the amount is ridiculous, but I’m a guy and I think what the women I know spend on clothing is ridiculous, too.  I don’t think any female politician has had her clothing budget leaked and held against her before.  Due to our stupid campaign finance laws, politics is now entirely the realm of self-financing millionaires, but when a middle class woman tries to enter the fray she suddenly has her clothing receipts examined.

While I’m on the subject: this middle class mom who lives in freaking’ cold Alaska and has three daughters decided to buy a used sun-tanning bed from a salon’s going-out-of-business sale…and somehow this reasonable luxury item is held against her in the campaign.  Did we see all of the other candidates’ entertainment expenses held up for ridicule?  Isn’t it very likely that the Palins have never had a vacation as luxurious as those taken by the Obamas, Bidens, McCains and Clintons several times a year?  Shall we start listing the multiple cars’ makes and models, motorcycles, boats, golf memberships, skis, vacation homes and polo ponies held by all of those?

Then there’s the snobbery of those who mocked Palin’s multiple colleges.  Sarah Palin’s biographer Kaylene Johnson was on Dennis Prager (be sure to give that a listen!) and her explanation of this was eminently reasonable: Sarah had to pay her own way through college!  Her parents didn’t have the money to send her and her siblings to school, so they all had to hunt for inexpensive options and raise the money themselves.  Sarah decides to go to college in Hawaii because, you know…Alaska.  So she and her Alaskan friends enroll in a Hawaiian college only to find when they arrive that the sandy beaches are on the other side of the island, so she eventually changes schools.  Later, she takes time off to raise more money to finish, and then decides to go somewhere else.  When you are poor and cannot justify traveling extensively, going to different colleges compensates a bit.

One of Sarah’s options for raising scholarship money was to compete in a beauty contest.  The mockery and hate which has been heaped upon her for doing so…largely by people who didn’t struggle to pay for college, who can’t even understand the limited opportunities open to a middle-class girl living in Alaska…well, it should seal off any argument that the liberals are full of compassion and empathy for the lower classes.  (Of course, anyone who remembers the Clinton era and the scorn aimed at Bill’s class of women knew that already.)

Ugh.  Obama has just won, and is now talking about “callused hands”.  Please.  The guy doesn’t know the meaning of the word!  Palin broke her hand hauling in seafood with her husband.  In an era when “Deadliest Catch” is big time TV, here we’ve got a candidate from the last real bit of frontier.  Alaska is where the spirit of the cowboys has gone, and yes, I think cowboys are good things.  I’m a conservative. 

Sarah Palin has had far more life experience than Obama and has yet to write one, let alone two, autobiographies.  Heck, when Obama was commissioned to write his first memoir, he grabbed his $125,000 advance and took a year to live in Bali in order to write it.  Bear in mind, at this point in his life, his biggest achievement was getting $125,000 and living in Bali.  (All right, to be fair he was given the advance because when he was elected the President of Harvard Law Review he had black skin.  If you are the President of Harvard Law Review and you have white skin, you don’t get $125,000, so make of that what you will.)  And at the end of the year, he still didn’t have a book because you can’t write a memoir based on a lack of experiences.  Jack Cashill makes a convincing case that Obama only produced his book because he had some help from an unknown ghostwriter whose name probably rhymes with Gilliam Pears.

Forget the snobs on the right and the left.  Sarah Palin is the Republican party’s future.  I never had the opportunity to vote for Ronald Reagan, having turned 18 in 1988.  Palin is the first Republican candidate in my lifetime for whom I could easily see myself knocking on doors, giving money in the hundreds and even (can’t believe I’m saying this) making phone calls.  If she runs in 2012, I will give up my evenings to hang out in the campaign office.  I will blog about her constantly.  I will write letters to the newspaper.

All my life, I have said that I’d have no problem with a woman president.  Just give me the American-born Maggie Thatcher.  Until Palin, I didn’t actually think it would ever happen.

Listening to the callers and the hosts on all the conservative talk shows, it’s clear that there is NO sexist resistance in the GOP.  Most conservatives would have sawn off a foot if they could have swapped Sarah Palin for the top of the ticket this year.  (At last, my subject line makes sense, eh?)