Palin's pairing with McCain has emboldened his campaign to issue a new battleground states ad proclaiming the GOP ticket as the harbinger of "change."  She's a fresh, cheerful face on the scene and has put a whole new spring in McCain's step.  Together, they're the reform ticket now, don't you know.  And that other celebrity guy, Obama...hell, he and his Democratic cronies in Washington are just "more of the same"...

Galling, oh yeah.  We could fulminate into a frenzy over this latest GOP crookery, but with only 60 days to go, we've no time to waste.  Don't get mad, get even, claimed one of our own many years ago.  We really must heed the call.   And Palin's downsides give us a whole new opportunity to seriously recast this "new" Republican ticket.

The public is very aware of how McCain moved to the Right to keep his campaign from diving deep. Now, with Palin, he's gone there even further, but her extreme views are just starting to become known.  He wants folks to think of his team as a fresh new face of change - the face of the future.  But, in fact, we can cement him to both the past and a more frightening future by stoking an already-established and not very flattering image of him as a captive right-winger - and then add Palin's beliefs to the mix.

McCain/Palin: The Right Wing Ticket, goes straight to the heart of their ideologies, and the best part about it is the public will know this to be true.  This GOP team is not only about voting with Bush 90% of the time (which is one message the GOP can't cop from us), it's still about giving tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the middle class and overturning Roe v. Wade and prohibiting abortions even in the case of rape and incest and putting Scalia/Thomas Supreme Court justices on the bench and drilling the hell out of our Alaskan national park and teaching creationism in our schools and….

American voters like to hew to the center; extreme ideologies one way or the other are too frightening.  And, frankly, the McCain/Palin ticket IS frightening when you really think about it.

Let’s think this one aloud.