In the hours before Sarah Palin's selection was announced last Friday, rumors of it began to fly on NPR early that morning. I went on Wikipedia because I was curious, among other things, to see what her educational background was. There I found what quickly got picked up as the confirming news reports flowed in: she had been awarded a BA in Journalism, University of Idaho.

I found a few more details in Wiki, but was surprised the next morning to hear on the radio that just the day before a Wiki editor had noticed that extensive editing and rewriting had been done to her page.

This was later covered by Noam Cohen in the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/technology/01link.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&ref=politics&oref=slogin

That someone had been "improving" her bio was surely weird, and by someone with the screen name "youngtrigg." I filed this Wikipedia news in the back of my mind, as one more odd thing in such a very odd week.

This comes back to mind today because it is now being reported in an AP story that the Veep pick actually attended five colleges in six years. I'm sure though that the McCain campaign knew this from their extensive vetting. After all, her singular lack of academic distinction places her in comfortable company with Senator McCain who finished 894th out of 899 in his Naval Academy graduating class.  It would not have been right for her to exceed him in this department, and I'm sure McCain's operatives were glad to know they shared this common denominator.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/04/palin-attended-5-colleges_n_124036.html

All this makes me wonder about a new enthusiasm gap among Republicans. That looming gap between Obama and McCain has been supplanted by a new, more disturbing chasm confronting the man who gave his acceptance speech tonight in a style that TV cameras found had put some spectators to sleep. This new gap was typified by dozy delegates on the floor who confessed to a decided preference for the speechmaking of Sarah Palin.

Oh well, I guess you can't have everything.