I feel slightly ill after watching this interview of people lining up to get a Palin autograph. The video is most disturbing, because of the level of misinformation about politics. One guy thought the president was going to impose martial law in a year or two.

When asked what they liked about Palin, her supporters pointed to values, such as freedom, fairness, realness, rather than to specific policies. To be fair, I'm sure that some people voted for Obama because they thought he was cool, rather than because of specific issues. However, Palin seems to have exploited this apolitical tendency in America by refusing to talk policy.

UPDATE: Really amazing debate about this book by Althouse and Goldberg on BloggingHeads. They fight! Ooooh. Both agree that Palin's beauty propelled her popularity.

I'm liking the spin-off discussions about American political culture and all that really interesting, rather than the discussions that are solely about Palin.