I was extremely apprehensive Thursday night for the Palen/Biden debate. My emotional state was really most like my feelings before a Steeler playoff game. The difference between a football game and debate, however, is that at the end of the game there’s an objective score to tell you who won. To me this match up was obvious – I thought Biden credible and statesmanlike and Palin’s faux-folksy mugging and evasions merely freakish. Both the Republican and Democratic talking heads admitted afterward that Palin’s shtick was a coached and practiced act, but the question was, would the American public buy that act? After all they were able to be conned into believing that George W. Bush, the spoiled rich boy, Yale grad and son of the former President of the United States was just a regular good ole boy, an average upstanding cowboy. Palin effortlessly spewed the language of the commercials that bracketed her appearance, delivering empty sentimental generalities with a plastic grin, branding herself and McCain as "mavericks" with the insouciance of a manufacturer slapping a made in America label on a Chinese product. It felt like an important moment – Palin’s right wing radio style speech at the Republican convention apparently impressed a lot of people, as did her hokey "hockey mom" persona (as if she weren’t a governor living in a mansion), and even, for a short period, seemed to tilt the election in McCain’s favor. A closer look swung the pendulum in the other direction, and she quickly was in danger of become an out and out joke. A lot of liberals were completely sure that she’d embarrass herself as much in the debate as she had in her interviews, but I knew that that was overconfidence, that Palin was a practiced debater who knew quite well how to project her style in the face of substance and had the sinister ability of a former Beauty Queen to endear herself on stage to the judges with eye contact and a wink. Thankfully it seems like the debate was like most debates, mostly a draw, with each side believing their candidate had won, and the undecideds (and how can ANYONE be undecided when there’s been so many clearly defined differences between the candidates from the beginning) still undecided.

I know I’m not alone in thinking this election is the most important of my lifetime. After that weird millennial period in 2000 when there was no clear winner and then Bush was appointed, I’ve felt as if I’d slipped into another dimension, like one of those science fiction stories where the guy wakes up one morning to find that the world is ruled by talking dinosaurs. Somehow we’d slipped into a grim parallel alternate universe, a blind alley leading to a dead end. In a better place another me was saying Wow, imagine if that idiot Bush had won the election, but this unlucky version of UBU was living it. The familiar America I’d known suddenly changed into a place where an administration invaded other countries for bogus reasons, tortured without hesitation, spied on citizens, seriously attempted to end the two party system and generally wiped its butt with the same Constitution it so vociferously claimed to be defending. A television news channel claimed to be "fair and balanced" while delivering only high volume administration propaganda and personal attacks on those who dared disagree. Religious Conservatives whose superstitious beliefs were laughed off the intellectual stage hundreds of years ago were taken seriously while legitimate scientists were ridiculed. The working class gleefully supported economic policies that shoveled money out of their pockets and into the vaults of rich people who already had more than they could count. A couple of guys who weaseled out of serving in Vietnam portrayed a wounded veteran as a traitor. Dissent was the same as Terrorism, and the whole earth our enemy. And the weirdest thing was – most people seemed not to notice, and when they did notice they generally approved, as if things had always been that way.

Which is why Barack Obama really does mean hope to me. I think that the only way to shock the universe back to sanity is to make the radical, historical, unusually sane move of electing him president. So many crazy things have happened that I wouldn’t have swallowed in a Kilgore Trout novel that it really scares me to see a strange cartoon character like Palin emerge, like some sinister two dimensional insect carnivore released from the melting Arctic ice, a mutant praying mantis, whose weird screeching and bizarre mannerisms seem to hypnotize her naive victims, arriving on the national scene just in time to save her prehistoric cicada mate, the crabbed, anciently wicked John McCain, from the forces of good.

Yeah, well, I told you things seemed crazy, but it does seem to me that everyone I know with an ounce of sensitivity shares a amorphous anxiety about this election. On so many levels there’s just something essentially crucial about the result. Things look pretty good at this second, but god knows stranger things have happened recently, and I won’t rest easy until Obama’s safely in the White House. This time I want to be in the universe where I can speculate Can you imagine what it’d be like if those freaks McCain and Palin won? instead of having to live it. Heck, yeah, darn right, you betcha!