Those of you who saw that one movie where Keanu Reeves plays Thomas Jefferson during the constitutional ratification debates will really appreciate Lee’s quote from the movie: the constitution was “designed to be a little bit harsh.”

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Update:  The HBO police have taken the video off the web, but here’s the text version.

I’m not sure if I hate this comparison as an insult to Al Gore, or love it as an insult to the Right.

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DailyKos recently commissioned a poll to gauge just how of touch rank and file Republicans are with reality.  And the answer is:  very.  Only 42% of Republicans say President Obama was born in the United States, compared to 36% who say he was not and 22% who aren’t sure.  Twenty-three percent of Republicans believe their state should secede from the Union, 39% believe Obama should impeached (which isn’t suprising, since 63% believe he’s a Socialist, 31% believe he’s a racist who hates people, and 24% believe he wants the terrorists to win), and 21% believe ACORN stole the 2008 election.

But there’s one number in the poll that’s been getting a lot of attention that strikes me as being surprisingly low.  Fifty-three percent of Republicans believe that Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama.  Obviously, I disagree with these people on the relative qualifications of Obama and Palin.  But my disagreement is more with the simple fact that they’re Republicans and not how they judge qualifications for elected office.  On the latter issue, I’m probably more in line with the Republicans who answered Palin than the Republicans who answered Obama.   While there are many seemingly objective factors by which one could say President Obama is more qualified than Sarah Palin–intelligence, temperment, worldliness, etc.–none of these matter as much to me as the fact he’s right and she’s wrong on the major issues a president has to deal with.  If I were a Republican who conceded the objective grounds for Obama’s superior qualification but agreed entirely with Palin on matters of policy, I would no doubt be among the 53% of my party saying she is more qualified than Obama.

To give an extreme example, even after the absurd revelations of the past few weeks, if a pollster were to ask me who I considered more qualified to be president, John Edwards or a generic but respectable Republican like, say, Orrin Hatch, I’d have to go with Edwards.  From my perspective, thinking about issues in the right way, starting with the correct baseline assumptions and principles and reaching the correct results, is the single most important qualification for an elected official.

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I am, however, interested in her to the extent that she remains a force in American politics and a potential presidential candidate in 2012.  Palin is, in many ways, the nightmare candidate for a partisan Republican who cares only about winning the next election.  She’s wildly popular with the conservative base, but deeply unpopular among moderates and independents.

She therefore also poses a unique problems for her potential Republican opponents.  Primary contests often feature arguments among the candidates over who is most electable.  But one of the characteristics of the rightward lurch of the Republican Party in the past year has been increasingly valuing ideological purity over electoral pragmatism.  Attacking Palin for being unelectable–that is, for being unpopular with those outside the conservative movement–isn’t likely to sit well with Republican Primary votes.  Indeed, there’s a strong case that the main reason for Palin’s appeal to conservatives is the contempt that non-conservatives have for her.

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All of this is an outgrowth of the idea fostered by people like Bill O’Reilly and Sarah Palin that millions of people who live in the United States and are American citizens, like people who live in cities or read the New York Times, aren’t really Americans. Under this premise, that day last November when a record number of people came out to vote for a guy with dark skin and funny sounding name was a tragic aberration, while a bunch of angry white guys screaming at their Congressmen is democracy in action, the (real) American people finally being heard!

For more required reading on Republican insanity over health care, see here.

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So I understand the desire to grasp for any sign of hope. Just as I get thrilled when the Pirates start a season 11-7 and start convincing myself that this is the year, that the team’s for real, so Republicans find themselves overjoyed that Obama’s approval ratings six months into his presidency are slipping and that polls show him tied with Mitt Romney and barely ahead of Sarah Palin. But there’s a lot of baseball left to be played. (The Pirates, by the way, are now 42-52). The 2010 midterms, and likely the 2012 presidential election as well, are going to determined by two things: the success of the stimulus, and health care reform. The former hasn’t really had a chance to operate yet, and the latter hasn’t even been brought to the floor in Congress. Until we have some sense of how Obama has delivered on those two issues, polls are essentially meaningless.

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This discussion demonstrates part of what makes Palin such a frustrating public figure. There are many fascinating questions about sexism and elitism surrounding the media’s coverage of and the country’s reaction to Sarah Palin, but she was so spectacularly and uniquely unqualified for the position to which she was nominated that these issues are almost impossible to analyze. There’s simply no basis for comparison: even Dan Quayle would have had more engagement with most issues of national importance in his first week in the Senate than Palin appears to have had in her entire life up to the time of her selection.

This reveals what a deeply cynical choice Palin’s nomination was in the first place. I suspect one reason the McCain campaign felt it could choose Palin without doing anything close to a proper vetting is because it thought it could answer any attacks on her, regardless of the merits, by charging sexism. This would have the added benefits of portraying liberals as hypocrites (since, you know, liberals are supposed to care about sexism) and maybe winning over some disaffected Hillary voters. Which just shows how poorly conservatives understand racism and sexism: only someone who sees all charges of sexism as equally meritless could fail to see a distinction between the treatment of a highly qualified and accomplished public servant like Clinton and an incompetent like Palin.

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Listening to Sarah Palin now is kind of like remembering how we used to wear Hypercolor T-shirts. I guess that was the kind of thing that would only make sense as a pre-teen in the 80s. Once puberty hit, wearing a Hypercolor T-shirt just meant wearing a shirt with hypercolor pit stains. Also, as far as I remember, all the Hypercolorness wore out after about 10 washes. What a drag! Anyway, it’s nice we have enough distance from Palin now that it’s charming to look back and say to ourselves, wow, what was that all about?

There is already speculation about Palin’s real motives for resigning, so I want to get in while the gettin’s hot. Here are my top pics for the *real* reason Palin resigned by the banks of Lake Lucille today:

1. Trig actually Bristol’s first child. This news is about to be revealed by some creepy person who collected skin and hair samples from both and now has definitive proof.
2. Having illicit affair with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News.
3. Got carried away on vacation in Palm Springs; signed Alaska up for timeshare; Alaska now has to sit by pool in scorching heat and hope resale value of timeshare improves.
4. Just another victim of toxic mold syndrome.
5. Paid off by Mark Sanford who, after poisoning Michael Jackson, was at a loss how to keep the news cycle rolling elsewhere.

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