Just when giddy Democrats and muddleheaded media magpies expected John McCain to pick the obvious—a Michigan-winning, cardboard-cutout former governor of Massachusetts—McCain picked the least-obvious—the current governor of Alaska. And what a pick! Sarah Palin is smart, fearless, tough, Christian, poised, charming, persistent, undauntable, young, principled, likable, accomplished, and beautiful. Did I mention she’s a woman and energetic mother of five?

Even without kids, she’s no slouch. In 2007, Palin went to Kuwait to visit Alaskan troops, cancelled the bridge to nowhere and cut her state’s 100 federal earmarks in half with a goal of whittling them down to a mere dozen:

“We really want to skinny it down,” said Karen Rehfeld, Gov. Sarah Palin’s budget chief.

Rehfeld recently wrote a memo to all state commissioners telling them that to “enhance the state’s credibility,” federal earmark requests for money should be only for the most compelling needs.

They should have a strong national purpose, Rehfeld told the commissioners, not just to fill funding gaps in the state budget.

Palin has leadership credentials not limited to her home state. She has firsthand experience with education and energy issues, which are transferable to the federal level. And unlike the Bush administration, she seems to believe in the concept of oversight.

But the kicker? Palin can shoot a gun.

Yesterday, CNN repeatedly showed a video clip of Palin at a shooting range and mingling with American troops. They played it over and over and over and over. And over and over. Wikipedia mentions her early morning moose hunting expeditions with her dad when she was a kid. Articles are already calling her a gun-toting beauty queen. So I started thinking about that image of Palin shooting a gun.

Because we all know gun-toting + beauty queen = sexy. Think about Angelina Jolie being a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Suddenly, it hit me: McCain is not pandering to disaffected female Hillary voters. If McCain is pandering to anyone, he is pandering to men. I say this because of the TPM posts already calling Sarah Palin a babe. I say this because of the subliminal effect of media images that bombard us. I say this because research shows that if you want to win the presidency, you need to win a majority of the white male vote more than any other demographic. How cunning of the Republicans, therefore, to rile up the distractible Democrats with PUMAs and Paris while secretly selecting a talented all-American female for the second-highest job in the land.