“Get Off My Lawn” Jokes, GOP Edition

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From TIME’s Amy Sullivan:

I’d missed this, but apparently Sarah Palin has taken to joking on the campaign trail that she’s been listening to Joe Biden’s speeches since she was a second-grader. The point, according to what she tells Katie Couric in a segment to air tonight, is to highlight the choice voters have in November between the new and the old:

“So he’s got a tremendous amount of experience and, you know, I’m the new energy, the new face, the new ideas and he’s got the experience based on many many years in the Senate and voters are gonna have a choice there of what it is that they want in these next four years.”

Okay. Shelving for the moment the question of whether age should be fair game in politics and setting aside the fact that if you read Palin’s statement above she could easily be talking about either Biden or McCain… Does it make sense to frame the election as a choice between experience and change when your running mate is the old Washington hand taking on the young new upstart? (And McCain, by the way, is 25 years older than Obama, while Biden has 21 years on Palin.)

If she’s using this line on the stump, this isn’t Palin going off the reservation. But I’ll be darned if I can see the point of it. Maybe there are voters out there willing to support the GOP ticket because they value newness over experience when it comes to Palin but not with Obama. I’m not sure all three of them will swing the election, though.