I was wandering around the DNC last week with my roommate, enjoying the festive air and the bounty of crazy people doing bizarre, attention-grabbing activities, when I made what I admit is something of a crass joke. "Hey," I said. "Wouldn't it be funny if, every time I passed anyone who looked remotely ethnic, I ran up to them and shouted, 'Yes we can!'?"

The joke, of course, is that it would not be funny at all. It would be really embarrassing and offensive to assume that anybody with slightly different pigmentation in their skin would vote for Obama simply because he's black, no questions asked (Does anybody remember Alan Keyes? There's a reason you have to wikipedia him. He didn't win anything.). So why is it that everybody thinks it's perfectly acceptable to assume that women are going to turn out in droves to vote for a woman, simply because she's a woman?

I grew up in good old conservative Tennessee, and I swear I didn't hear a kind word about Hillary Clinton the whole time I was there. Even from women. I didn't even know people liked her until last year, when I was able to warm up to her a bit myself. The news talked incessently about her picking up the female vote (as though she was born with that vote in the bag), but you know, it all panned out pretty evenly. If she had gotten "the female vote" (as though they vote in bloc!), she would have handily won the nomination.

And now you have McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for VP, which I think was an incredibly shrewd choice (I just hope it wasn't shrewd enough to tilt things in his favor). I think it was shrewd for a number of reasons, but none of these reasons have to do with Palin picking up the mythical "female vote." Palin will appeal to, oh, I imagine about half of American women. Roughly the same amount as sympathize with her [incredibly] conservative views. She's excited conservatives, she's gotten endless news coverage since the announcement, she's generating much needed attention for the Republicans, but she didn't just sew up the election by virtue of her reproductive organs. Ok?

Oy. So anyway, I've decided that, since I feel far too guilty to actually subject my friends to endless inane political talk, I'm going to broadcast it into the great void of the web, where it will bounce around harmlessly and bore only those who wish to read it. Say, have I told you about the series of articles I'm planning to write...