Lucky for me, I personally know very few people who are voting for the Palin/Joe the Plumber/McCain ticket.
But I do know a handful and here’s my snapshot of the three-headed Cerberus base:
Case study #1: Male, about 50, white, college-degree, owns his own business. By his own admission, hasn’t read a newspaper in years, except for the sports pages. In the several years I’ve known him, he has yet to have mentioned reading a book. When you talk politics with him, he references “facts” gleaned from Internet email forwards from people he doesn’t know. When you talk politics with him, he actually says stuff like, “Sarah’s hot.” (He never mentions McCain.)
Case study #2: Female, about 45 (just guessing), white. No education past high school. Reads quite a bit, she says. She, too, references Internet email forwards as her primary source of political acumen. She actually says stuff like, “Yeah, but I got an email that proves Obama is Muslim.” She, too, never mentions John McCain, but says she “loves Sarah McCain.” I’m not sure whether she means she loves Sarah Palin or Cindy McCain … but, hey, she knows she loves at least one of them!
Case study #3: Male, late 40s I think, white, college-degree. Pretty intelligent guy, from what I can tell. But the little I know about him — I think explains why a lot of MAMs (middle-aged males) are so goo-goo-eyed and ga-ga-brained over Palin.:
This guy seems to swoon over Palin’s down-home, eye-winking, smile-twinkling, big-breasted, long-hair, sexy glasses, oh, shucks, act. He seems charmed pant-less by her “I’m just a hockey mom/small-town gal” comments. But that’s only half of it.
He likes her brain too! He’s clearly head over heels with her politics: guns, shooting and gutting animals, drilling (and the vertiginous sexual imagery thereof), death penalty, anti-choice, anti-gays. By George, she’s a real man’s woman! And I think she makes him feel like a real man’s man.
I’m sure he imagines he could be happily married to a woman like Palin (if only he could get rid of his current wife) because she seems to really understand the difficulties of being a MAM in this day and age. (Yes, he’s actually commented that MAMS – particularly white MAMs – are getting totally screwed in America and not in the way they’d like to be.)
Only problem is, the minute he got someone like Palin home, he’d realize she’s one of the reasons MAMs are so angry and frustrated in the first place.
Oh, sure, MAMs across the country are besotted with Palin’s pit bull persona in theory, and case-study #3 in particular would think he was in a wet-dream with Palin’s skill in bilking Alaska out of a $50 per diem for 312 nights she spent at her own home (‘cause this guy is about nothing if not the dollar bill).
But, and I’m just guessing here: the minute he realized Palin’s public personality — sarcastic, belittling, greedy, ball-busting — doesn’t stop at the bedroom door — once he realized he was in bed with a real-live pit bull sporting bared teeth and snarling lips, however lipsticked they might be — I’m pretty sure he’d have an embarrassingly, um, not-so-hard time figuring out just which one of them was the real bitch in the bed.