Sarah Palin on a motorcycle

Waiting for tonight’s vice presidential debate is like being passed by a motorcycle on the freeway. I’m going 70 and the motorcycle is going 90. This is very aggravating because nobody should be going 90 on four wheels, much less two, and if this guy cracks up right in front of me, I am going to be stuck with a dreadful nightmare for the rest of my life.

You can say jeez, that guy gets killed, and you are worrying about yourself? Well, yeah. That’s the way it is. I don’t want to see him get killed, particularly the way a person going 90 on a motorcycle down a freeway is likely to get killed. I do not want to see that. He sure won’t have to live with it, but I will.

In fact that is exactly what my brain is yelling at him when he goes by. Do you have a brain? Don’t you have parents? Who told you it was all right to go 90 on a motorcycle in front of other people on a busy freeway? Yes, he is an moron, but I hold my breath for him, and for me, until he is out of sight.

I am holding my breath for Sarah Palin today. When John McCain rolled a huge red motorcycle into her driveway that day in August, she should have said right then, “No way am I getting on that thing.” I know I would feel a lot better today, and so would John McCain, in spades no doubt. McCain isn’t just another driver on the freeway today, he’s on Palin’s buddy seat.

I don’t feel sorry for him because he should have known better. He wanted Joe Lieberman. No, said the party managers, if you want to be president you need this red motorcycle. Today, squirming on the buddy seat with Palin’s hair in his face, he might be thinking about Lieberman and feeling like he turned his back on Gandhi.

Am I sorry? No, but it still makes my hair stand on end. This GOP ticket looks just like another motorcycle I saw once, hauling through freeway traffic in San Diego, populated by the operator, who was a man; a woman, on the buddy seat behind him; a baby, facing backward, in a carrier on the woman’s back, and a rangy white dog, his hind feet wedged in the man’s crotch and his front feet on the handlebars. Does anybody that stupid deserve to crash? Yes. Does anybody want to watch it? No.

It’s only noon and I am in a flinch. I can’t get my eyes more than halfway open. She has to go 90 minutes with millions of people watching. She couldn’t go five minutes with Katie Couric without having to lean on her training wheels. Tina Fey, who after this debate may launch a second career playing Palin, was so funny on SNL when she said, “Katie, can I take a life line?”

I am worried that tonight it will be funny for five minutes and then we will have 85 minutes to go. Somebody, I think it was Judith Warner in the Times, wrote that McCain picking Palin was not only insulting, it was cruelty. I know, I could turn it off, not watch at all. But damn it, she is a candidate for the vice presidency of the United States of America. I am stuck on this freeway with 304 million people and I can’t get off.