About 12 days ago the Republican Party discovered women.

This put GOP approximately 100 years behind the learning curve of most recognizable institutions in America, but in time for their national political convention in St. Paul.

Until then the consensus of the Republican Party’s leadership assigned to women a public significance that pretty much began and ended with the story of Eve and the apple.

But this is 2008, boys, the GOP potentates in charge of John McCain warned. “There is trouble. Right now in this here election. The country is a basket case and we’re responsible. We’re laying off thousands of workers every day and tinkering with another war in the Middle East and our candidate for president seems to be thrilled by that idea. We need something to take the voters’ minds and the TV cameras off our candidate.”

“What about a woman?” somebody said. And the response was electric. “That’s it. We, the party of George Bush, Tom Delay and Dick Cheney, need something to distract the voters. We need to do this in the honored tradition of Willie Horton, the stolen election in Florida and our Swift Boat predators of 2004.”

So Sarah Palin flew in or, if you want to accept the growing new mythology, swept in from Alaska on her Zamboni.

And here we are. The polls show John McCain inching ahead of Barack Obama. The explanation of the pollsters is the new energy Sarah Palin has pumped into McCain’s once-wheezing campaign.

It would be comical to deny it. She is advertised as a hockey mom, an unswerving anti-abortionist, a woman of great faith whose pastor believes God led us into Iraq, the heroine of the Bridge to Nowhere saga and the Hillary Clinton of the Klondike.

And this is only the second week.

For all of her qualities, the attractive ones and the invented ones, she was brought into the campaign carrying one primary identity. She was going to be a distraction from the economic and political chaos and ruin the Republicans have created in the eight years of the Bush government.

And she is suddenly the principle player in the smoke and mirror strategy that was the one hope of the demoralized Republican cadres looking at an almost certain defeat.

Now, we are told by the pollsters, they are not.

The irony in this is that if they’re right, and the Republicans can pull this out amid the growing befuddlement of the American public, the country will be putting the keys to power back into the hands of the same invisible manipulators who have been running it into the ground for eight years, along with millions of vulnerable people.

None of that is essentially going to change. It will probably worsen. With McCain fumbling in the White House and reminding us of his biography, the Pentagon’s favorites will still hog the money. The financial industry, whose greed plunged millions of people into de facto bankruptcy and out of their homes, will continue basically unregulated. A Democratic Congress can act, but today it needs 60 votes to pass anything of substance and you can usually subtract Joe Lieberman.

None of this has to happen if the American public looks seriously at the spreading ugliness of the country’s condition today today. The government bureaus are filled with hacks whose primary condition of employment is to undermine the regulatory powers they were supposed to enforce. So the mortgage and credit card industries went wild and turned customers into paupers. Profiteers raided the people’s treasury. Shameless tax cuts to millionaires and endless war have shredded the schools’ ability to compete with the rising powers of China and India in the technical skills not only of the future but in the here and now.

The same behind- the-scenes operators who ran the government under George Bush will be back in a McCain White House that is likely to be even more inept and clueless. So essentially it will be guided by the same ventriloquists who will do most of the governing. The victims will be the same—the uninsured, the unemployed, the fading middle and working classes, and the faith all of those people put in the hands of a government once dedicated to the common good. There is a reason why American veterans, who actually fought to preserve that ideal or were put in harm’s way needlessly, are looking increasingly looking to Obama to bring the country back to its senses.

That is the case that has to be made to the American public in the next seven weeks. If it isn’t, by the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party, on television and in the flesh, the strategy of smoke and mirrors worked one more time.

The good news: There are seven weeks left and the endgame—and its consequences for the country-- shouldn’t be that hard for the voters to see through the smoke.

---Jim Klobuchar

© 2008 Jim Klobuchar