Simply put, that's not gonna happen ...
And that's why the best way for you to approach Sarah Palin will be to forget that she is a woman. Tell yourself that she is a machine in 3-inch heels that has been programmed to make you look brutish and aggressive. She will attack, and you will smile. She will make jokes, and you will laugh. Do whatever you need to do—take four Percocet, deploy Zen breathing techniques—to prevent yourself from attacking this woman. And do just as much not to pay attention to her. Even if she pulls out her breast pump during commercials, keep your eyes glazed over on the middle distance. No compliments. Don't say you like her shoes. Just the facts, Joe.
You will need to match Palin point for point in the blue-collar-off. If she invokes her sister's gas station, bring up your cousin's Laundromat. (Try to locate one in the coming days, if you aren't in possession of one already.) If she mentions the threshers, you need to see her the threshers and raise her the balers. If she mentions the Washington media elite that hate her, you can truthfully tell her they've been calling you a blowhard for decades.
Caution: Sarah Palin is funny. And it's the kind of jeering Ann Coulter-funny that's assuredly going to irritate the heck out of you. She'll suggest you are a coward and unpatriotic and also (heh heh) that you are corrupt and dishonest. Keep your poker face. Poker face when she says you plan to raise taxes on the middle class. Poker face when she says she has plans to sell Barack Obama's next celebrity memoir on eBay and give all the money to special-needs children. Don't lunge (a la Lazio). Don't sigh (a la Gore). Don't roll your eyes (a la Where the Wild Things Are) or look longingly into the camera as if to plead "This is the best they could find for me?" Just nod sagely and refute logically. Get off a zinger if you can. ("You're nice enough Sarah" does not constitute a zinger.) But you are not going to beat her at the victim game, or the regular-folks game, or the humor game. You have to beat her on the fact that you are qualified to be a heartbeat from the presidency and that in 10 years she may be, as well.
Take a page from Campbell Brown's book and ask politely (and like you really want to know the answer and not just hear yourself say the question) what she learned while leading the Alaska National Guard into that war against Saskatchewan. But play to your strengths. Know stuff. Say it briefly. Don't accuse her of not knowing things. Just know more. An insanely successful college debate friend told me recently that the way he won against women was by always behaving like they were men.
My senior year in college, I debated in Glasgow, Scotland, against men who all stood up when I entered the room. One guy called me a "little flower" in the quarterfinals. Welshmen asked me to fetch coffee. What I learned from that experience was how deeply glad I was to live in a country where, for the most part, a woman can argue, tell jokes, kick ass, or get her ass kicked, just like a man. In 2008, in St. Louis, against a charming, cocky Alaska governor, that will only be truer. Thank goodness we live in a time and place in which nobody expects you to pull the chair out for your opponent or compliment her brooch, and nobody will be offended if you shake her hand firmly and pound her on national security. My best advice to you for dealing with Gov. Palin? Fight like a man. She will.
