Republican Presidential candidate John McCain has stirred up a hornet’s nest among the American media and Barack Obama Democrats. Polls show the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin leading both presidential candidates in popularity with voters.

A recent Rasmussen poll found that 51 percent of Americans believe the media’s negative coverage of Gov. Palin unfair. It also found that 24 percent are more likely to vote for the McCain-Palin ticket because of the harsh media onslaught. This dramatic change in political fortunes for Republicans has raised fears among Obama campaign strategists and their allies in the main-stream-media.

According to Atlantic Monthly Online, “In memos, e-mails and phone calls this week, Obama campaign officials have urged surrogates and allies to mention Republicans who are ‘nervous’ about the Palin pick and to link those worries to George McGovern's aborted Vice-Presidential pick of Thomas Eagleton in 1972…”

Sen. Thomas Eagleton had a history of mental illness and was hospitalized for depression three times and given electro-shock treatments. McGovern dropped Eagleton from the Democratic ticket shortly after the disclosures. Implicit in the Obama campaign memo is that Palin is mentally ill. What is it about Palin that engenders this diagnosis from the media and Democratic armchair psychiatrists?

The leftist British newspaper The Manchester Guardian got it partially right, though peppering its analysis with anti-Christian hysteria, “Her [Palin’s] career took off precisely at the moment when the Christian right seized control of the Republican movement, casting out the fiscal conservatives who had traditionally held sway with their focus on such worldly matters as low taxes and small government.”

The Guardian continued to lament Palin’s success in small-town Alaskan politics because of her refusal to run on such important issues as road improvements and litter clean up and “campaigning instead against abortion and gun control and casting aspersions on her (Republican) opponent about his infrequent attendance of church.”

The Left and Right wings of America’s political parties squabble over questions of money—how much to rifle from the taxpayers, which taxpayers, and which constituencies those taxpayer-funds to shower on to secure their hold on political power. Materialists, Left and Right, scratch their heads when confronted by those who believe “man does not live by bread alone.” How do you buy-off a large constituency for whom transcendent truths are of greater value than the coin of the realm?

The greatest left-handed praise for the Republican vice presidential pick came from Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, “Sen. McCain had so many other options if he wanted to put a woman on his ticket, such as Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe—they would have been an appropriate choice compared to this dangerous choice.”

The “danger” for materialist Democrats and Republicans is that Sarah Palin steers the political discourse away from money matters and into a realm where beliefs inform ideas and those ideas inform one’s politics. The real danger arises when voters ask soulless nihilists to put down their ledger books and answer the question, “what do you believe in and why do you believe in it?”

--Mr. Curmudgeon