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."
Finally, 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."
Blame the sycamore tree.
McCain had met Palin only once -- in February, at the governor's convention in Washington, D.C. -- before the day he selected her as his running mate. The second time was at his Sedona, Ariz., ranch on Aug. 28, just four days before the GOP convention.
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." One does not have to be a psychoanalyst to reckon that McCain was smitten. By no means am I suggesting anything untoward between McCain and his running mate. Palin is a governor, after all. She does have an executive resume, if a thin one. And she's a natural politician who connects with people.
But there can be no denying that McCain's selection of her over others far more qualified -- and his mind-boggling lack of attention to details that matter -- suggests other factors at work. His judgment may have been clouded by ... what?
Science provides clues. A study in Canada, published in New Scientist in 2003, found that pretty women foil men's ability to assess the future.
"Discounting the future," as the condition is called, means preferring immediate, lesser rewards to greater rewards in the future.
Drug dealers, car salesmen and politicians rely on this affliction and pray feverishly for its persistence.
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