Updated: Reformatted

In Friday's Washington Post, conservative columnist, Kathleen Parker, made the claim that McCain picked Palin because she is attractive. She wrote the following:

My husband called it first. Then, a brilliant, 75-year-old scholar and raconteur confessed to me over wine: "I'm sexually attracted to her. I don't care that she knows nothing."

... writer Robert Draper closed the file on the Sarah Palin mystery with a devastating article in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine: "The Making (and Remaking) of McCain."

McCain didn't know her. He didn't vet her. His campaign team had barely an impression. In a bar one night, Draper asked one of McCain's senior advisers: "Leaving aside her actual experience, do you know how informed Governor Palin is about the issues of the day?"

The adviser thought a moment and replied: "No, I don't know."

As Draper tells it, McCain took Palin to his favorite coffee-drinking spot down by a creek and a sycamore tree. They talked for more than an hour, and, as Napoleon whispered to Josephine, Voila. Blame the sycamore tree. .. One does not have to be a psychoanalyst to reckon that McCain was smitten.

She has that effect. I notice it during her convention speech, on myself. Obviously I'm not the only one. I found her very appealing, and realized that many men and women would react the same. If what she was saying was true, she was a tested version of Obama, someone who had already changed government in Alaska. As the days went by and I realized that much of her speech was bull, I was able to see the appeal for what it really was, that is, she's got lots of sex appeal.

During the third presidential debate, I noticed a unique trend in voter response during McCain's recitations of Palin's supposed accomplishments in Alaska. Near the bottom of the video there is a real time graph which represents the response of uncommitted voters to what McCain is saying. The graph is broken into two line representing male and female responses.
 

Notice the response by gender. I suspect many women are well aware of the Palin appeal and how she uses it to manipulate men.

According to a Canadian study beautiful women clouds men's judgment. Sure we know that, but I am taken aback by how it can happen on such a grand scale. 

The Canadian psychologists showed pictures of attractive and not-so attractive men and women to students of the opposite sex. The students were offered a prize -- either a small check for the next day or a larger check at some later date.

The men made perfectly rational decisions, opting for the delayed larger amount after viewing the average-looking women. You know where this is going.

(Women, by the way, were rational no matter what.)

That men are at a disadvantage when attractive women are present is a fact upon which women have banked for centuries. Ignoring it now profits only fools. McCain spokesmen have said that he was attracted to Palin's maverickness, that she reminded him of himself.

Recognizing oneself in a member of the opposite sex (or the same sex, as the case may be) is a powerful invitation to bonding. Narcissus fell in love with his own image reflected in the river, imagining it to be his deceased and beloved sister's. In McCain's case, it doesn't hurt that his reflection is spiked with feminine approval.

It probably explains to a large extent Palin's success in Alaska. How we men are so easily duped. Somehow I think most women know what's going on. Anyone notice all the accessories talk going on at Palin's rallies lately?