Dickerson’s take:
All campaigns must change in order to handle the arrival of a vice-presidential candidate. To accommodate Sarah Palin, John McCain’s Straight Talk Express has now installed a fainting couch. It’s not for the vice-presidential candidate—she’s plenty tough—but for McCain aides who are rapidly perfecting the act of expiring on the cushions on her behalf at every sign of perceived sexism.
UPDATE: As for me, I’ll be more sympathetic to their cries of sexism the first time I see one of these in an airport gift shop with Sarah Palin’s face on it.
UPDATE2: JP’s take, which is an argument that many of our commenters have been making:
Another important reason to mau-mau the press about sexism: when you later gin up a B.S. controversy, enough journalists—you don’t need all of them—will feel obligated to report it as a legitimate, he-said-she-said, who-knows-the-real-truth story, even if they really see it to be a baldfacedly cynical campaign ploy.
[By the way: "mau-mauing the press about sexism" does not mean that all charges of sexism in coverage have been false. Just the opposite. In order for this strategy to work, it has to start from a legitimate example. Then you take that example—in this case, reporters asking if Palin can be a good mom and a good VP—and link it to examples of sexism that are only from "the media" in the broadest sense, like late-night comedy jokes. Then you go from there to the charge that any critical coverage is sexist. And hopefully you create an environment in which journalists see the whole thing as a minefield and go the he-said-she-said route.]
