One of the worst things about the wall-to-wall coverage of Sara Palin, from the cable shows to the front page of The New York Times to the cover of People Magazine to the leftwing blogosphere, is how brilliantly the Republicans managed to bury the Obama campaign's triumph in Denver in tabloid trash.

You have to hand it to McCain. For all the Democrats have been outperforming him this year, with youth appeal, a winning pitch to the working class, a historic moment of racial reconciliation, not to mention a candidate who was right about the disastrous war in Iraq, within hours the Republicans managed to distract the entire nation with a rerun of the Pat Buchanan's culture wars. Obama's speech at Mile High Stadium may have attracted more viewers than the final episode of American Idol. But the Republicans knew that all that optimism and high-minded policy talk--even with a great soundtrack and an American family values theme that made white people feel good about feeling good about black people--was no match for a new episode of the Mommy Wars. Throw in the pregnant teenaged daughter, the heavily featured baby with Downs, and Round 57 of the abortion debate, and you have a story with legs that stretch from here to November.

It's like Monica Lewinsky, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan rolled into one. Who cares about the housing market collapse?

Karl Rove must be laughing his head off. It was McCain, after all, who tarred Obama as a celebrity, tying him to Spears and Paris Hilton (whose family happen to be big McCain contributors). Now he has his own celebrity candidate to blow away all those
inconvenient topics like the tanking U.S. economy.

All Palin All The Time coverage bumped Obama out of the news before the papers carrying stories about the last night of the Denver convention hit the front lawn. TV and radio were all over it in the Denver airport as the entire U.S. political press corps passed through security.

The Republican Convention itself, and especially McCain's speech, demonstrated the complete ideological bankruptcy of a party that has been in power for eight years and managed to run nearly everything in its charge into the ground. The loosely linked series of bromides McCain offered up--less government, more tax cuts--contained absolutely nothing to explain to voters why they should believe that his Administration would do things differently from Bush.

And then there was Palin. The pit bull with lipstick. The small town mayor and recently elected governor with the light resume, parochialism to the point of almost never having left the country, and smug, down-home delivery. She resembles uncannily the
guy-you'd-like-to-have-a-beer-with the Republicans kept locked in the White House during their convention. Have Republicans learned nothing from listening to Bush stumble his way through press conferences and meetings with foreign leaders over the last eight years? Apparently not.

The cameras love Palin, love her visibly pregnant daughter, her prop of a baby who was passed around night after convention night. The Republicans love the chance to bash the reviled "liberal media" for covering these aspects of the candidate's personal life, even as they flaunt them.

Best of all, for the McCain campaign, is the Palin trap: their twin nemeses, liberals and the press, can't stop talking about her. And the more we talk, the worse things get. The Obama campaign is in a virtual news blackout, even as McCain rises in the polls.

Feminist attacks on Palin for her anti-abortion views, her PTA-promoting style, her beauty queen background, feed right into the lowbrow media catfight narrative that keeps her in the news. It also pisses off a lot of PTA moms and other lipstick-wearing voters, which is an added bonus for McCain.

Memo to progressives: forget the lipstick. Focus on the pit bull.

Having a woman leader who nurses her baby while she works and lets her kids run around the office is a great advance for women and families in our country, unless that woman happens to want to enact policy that will prevent other mothers from having the kind of flexible work, government-supported family leave, child care, and other benefits that make that enviable lifestyle possible.

Palin's family values stop at her own front door. She actually used her line item to cut funding for a program that housed unwed teenaged mothers in Alaska. (Too bad for those girls who don't get to live in the governor's mansion). She claims she will be an
"advocate in the White House" for families with special needs children, but she has not supported a single piece of legislation that would actually help those families, nor does her tax-cutting, program-slashing ideology give many grounds for hope.

Palin's story, like all celebrity stories, is about one individual--her struggles, victories, and embarrassments. It is not a story of collective struggle. Nor is her victory a victory for women or working class people or any other group besides the people who were cynical enough to put her there. She may get a lot of us talking, but her story is not about the rest of us, except insofar as we are invited to participate as voyeurs. We gawk because we imagine some connection with the famous-person-who-is-just-a-regular-gal. It's pure fantasy. It's also a hell of a way to elect someone who might very well be our next President.