The rise of Sarah Palin

Via Mister Snitch, I came across this detailed, link-heavy blog post about Sarah Palin's political career, beginning with her first race for City Council in 1992, and including her 2004 decision to quit a plum $118,000 a year seat on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission after the Attorney General and Governor not only ignored her concerns about corruption on the AOGCC, but also, in the case of the AG, threatened her with prosecution if she blew the whistle:

Why do I mention Palin's apolitical roots? Because they help explain three things about her that become important later. One, how she's been able to stay grounded to have a normal, non-political person's reactions to the kinds of things politicians get inured to seeing. Two, why her views on reform, corruption and waste were not a pre-designed program but the evolving product of those reactions kicking in over time in response to things she observed first-hand. And three, how she was able to make the most important decision of her political career - to walk away from it all on principle with the significant chance that she was ending her career in politics.

On a related note, I enjoyed SNL's opening sketch, which was, as expected, a spoof of Thursday's Palin-Biden debate. Unlike the real Gwen Ifill, the fictional Ms. Ifill (played by the lovely Queen Latifah) made an opening disclosure about her upcoming book about the "Age of Obama."

I was also pleased that the SNL writers captured a moment that struck me as one of the biggest surprises in the debate: Biden saying, "Look, in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple." Compressing the exchange slightly, the writers came close to quoting Biden's comments verbatim. I haven't seen much discussion of this in the blogosphere, so it's nice to see that I wasn't the only one who was surprised by his blunt embrace of his radical position on this issue.