Todd (Palin) and me: Day two on the T-Pal Caravan
On Thursday night I dreamed that my friend Joe (not a plumber) had 33 children and was running for the U.S. Senate. He also was, somehow, living in my former one-bedroom Minneapolis apartment with this unfathomable brood and a wife. As I motored off from the Bemidji Holiday Inn shortly before 8 a.m. Friday morning, I contemplated whether this rather bizarre dream had somehow been summoned by my pursuit of Todd Palin.
I really had just one pressing question to ask the First Dude: Does he think Alaska should secede from the United States of America? (Well maybe two: where did he intend to ride his snow machine upon taking up residence in Washington, D.C.?) Palin had, after all, been a member of the Alaskan Independence Party — which has at times advocated becoming an autonomous republic — up until 2002. In fact it wasn’t until after his wife was picked as the party’s VP nominee that he actually registered as a Republican.
But actually asking Palin that question — or any question for that matter — looked like a fairly formidable task. Suffice it to say that the highly orchestrated five-stop caravan through Minnesota was not set up to allow him to pontificate on policy matters and potentially become an embarrassing liability for John McCain’s presidential campaign. Rather Palin’s whistlestop tour was designed to fire up a very targeted niche of the GOP base, namely hunters and snowmobilers.
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