Sarah Palin's appeal

THE Republican Party strategists were simply brilliant in picking Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate. It does not matter how many times McCain had spoken to her before the announcement (no more than twice according some reports), the choice will quieten the tongue-wagging critics of McCain's somewhat liberal positions during his long Senate career. Big-wig talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh et al will be heaving a sigh of relief now.

That she will draw the disaffected women from the Hillary support camp is only a small fraction of the calculation behind the choice of Palin. I don't see big numbers in that draw; it could, in fact, backfire and drive women voters back into the Democrat fold.

Apart from the media-pundits' buzz about Sarah Palin, a former beauty-queen, being a neophyte in politics, make no mistake that she has tons of qualifications that Hillary and Obama desperately lack. It may be difficult for us Indian sub-continentals, or even Europeans, to appreciate them. We go "wow!" at someone with a Harvard or Yale Law degree.

To a vast number of Americans living West of the Mason-Dixon line, earning a Law degree from Harvard (Obama's Alma Mater) or Yale (Hillary's) is a sure sign of having an effeminate character. When you don't have the brawns to fell trees in the dead of winter in Alaska, you use your puny brain to create laws to make such logging illegal!

To these communities "www" still stands for Wild Wild West. People of these communities are frontiersmen, lovers of nature's abundance to be used as God has willed it to be used by man. Hence, while nature's gifts were squandered with abandon in the name of development, people's mental development has remained arrested since the beginning of 20th century.

They are cattle ranchers, cowboys, cowhands and farmers, handymen in pickup trucks and moms driving older model gas-guzzlers in hair-rollers. Summer weekends consist of churchgoing followed by a High School softball game, backyard or tailgate barbecue where huge chunks of burnt meat are consumed, washed down by pints of beer bottled by local brewery.

Winters are for hockey games -- i.e. hockey on ice with players on skates, not the field kind. Long winters are conducive to other indoor activities such as church group meetings.

Suggesting that God created the world in six days is a poetic expression, a Scriptural metaphor, or a "creation myth" as in many world religions, could land you in nasty trouble with these church groups. The common feature that binds the bewildering variety of churches belonging to Evangelical Protestantism all across America is this literalist reading of the Bible (King James Version, 1611 A.D.).

They are the proponents of teaching creationism as a part of the science curriculum in public schools. In the Biblical phrase "God created man in His own image" the word "image" is taken to mean a mug shot of God; and God in that shot is most definitely a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant male. Human beings showing any other shade of skin colour or racial feature are tolerated as humanoids of sorts, not easily regarded as "fellows" as in "fellow human beings."

Other than a handful of farmhands of Mexican or Honduran origin, mostly illegal immigrants, seasonal labourers, ill-paid and badly exploited, there is not much of a racial mix in these communities. Thanks to the media hype, Muslims are synonymous with terrorists.

The threat of nuclear warfare with Soviet Union has been replaced with Al- Qaieda's threat to destroy America, and, therefore, President Bush is right to fight that threat in Iraq. Senator John McCain, the Vietnam veteran, can be trusted to carry on the fight when he is elected president.

Sarah Palin's husband is a fisherman, and so is she. He owns a trawler, I believe. She is an outdoor sportswoman like many of her likely voters, a rifle-toting hunter and a snowmobile rider. Her one area of expertise seems to be in the energy sector, and her enthusiasm is all about continuing usage of fossil fuel in the foreseeable future since there is much to explore in her own backyard, the pristine forests of Alaska.

McCain could not have ensured a larger vote-bank by choosing any other running mate. I cannot see all Hillary supporters voting for McCain just because he has a woman as his VP nominee. But Republicans can now claim that they are just as pro-women as the Democrats. Palin's fundamentalist credential is an added boost that will help bring the map back into the old red and blue colours of post-election 2004. That is a huge gain for McCain and a cause for concern for the Obama/Biden ticket.

Thus far in the campaign, Obama's populism has succeeded in bringing in a lot of new people, mostly the young educated crowd. Now is time for his campaign to get off the beaten track of anti-war crowds of MoveOn.org and hit the dirt roads of the hinterland.

Joe Biden being a Catholic is not a great help in the context of more than 30 million listeners of Protestant fundamentalist talk radio hosts like Rev. James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Jim Falwell, etc. Moreover, Catholics of America, including the huge Hispanic population, have mostly voted Democratic in the past.

No matter how thin the line is, there is a demarcating line between religious conservatism and the raving fundamentalism of the Evangelical Pentecostal Church, the largest congregation in the US. Palin's choice as the VP candidate of the GOP has stoked anew the fire of fundamentalism. The Democrats better find a way to contain the ensuing scourge.