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The Palin Phenomenon

Katie and I read different magazines. For news, Katie reads Time while I read The Economist. It is common in our household to swap articles that we think the other will find particularly interesting. Amusingly, the last articles we swapped were each editorials on Sarah Palin, this one from Time and this one from The Economist.

The first article (in Time) suggests that the reason the Republicans have pulled even in the polls is Palin's abililty to propagate the myth of idyllic small-town America. It is a well understood psychological phenomenon that good memories from the past are much better remembered than bad memories. Perhaps this explains voters' irrational obsession with mental images of the good times of yore that never really existed. According to this mythology, McCain and Palin are trying to restore all the good things from the past that people remember inaccurately. Obama isn't able to do so much along those lines. Will the incumbent party be able to overcome the huge mess of a pyramid scheme that our financial system has become? It will be interesting to see if the mythology wins over that.

The second article (in The Economist) talks about Palin's vice-presidential run and Clinton's almost-presidential run and suggests that while gender-based hatred is still prevalent (one anti-Hillary lobbyist started a group called Citizens United Not Timid), some indicators suggest that women are actually proving their superiority to men on a population-wide scale. My favorite interesting tidbit is that women earn 57% of the bachelor's degrees in the U.S. That just astounds me, especially in the modern U.S. economy which pays such a premium for post-secondary education. Are men really so stupid? (Respect the rhetorical nature of that question, please!)

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