It is no secret that ours is a celebrity culture, and that rou-
tinely means that issues get short shrift in our public discourse.
In the first weeks following Palin’s debut, in the grip of Palima-
nia, Americans heard about her seventeen-year-old daughter’s
untimely pregnancy and Palin’s installation of a tanning bed in
the governor’s residence (an act hailed as a blow to the “the
sun-scare industry” by the tanning lobby). In what could be
called the Peoplemagazine phase of the race, the incidental
drove out the substantial, in part, because the McCain cam-
paign kept Palin, who performed best when scripted, away
from traditional media. Cable TV filled its gaping news hole
with such inconsequential questions as whether McCain looked
less like the presidential candidate than Palin’s second banana.
All that changed when giant investment banker Lehman
Brothers announced it would seek bankruptcy protection on
September 15; the Dow plummeted, and people began pulling
their cash out of their banks. Suddenly the campaign focused
with laser-like intensity on the battered economy and the pain
it was causing voters. The resonant personal stories carefully
constructed by the candidates and their handlers were put
aside, and the public was able to compare and contrast the can-
didates’ very different positions on matters of real weight. For
a time, the carnival-like process of choosing a president and
vice president was relinked to the next phase in the process—
the one of paramount importance: how the president we
choose will lead and, thus, shape our lives and those of our
children and grandchildren. But just as the debate seemed fi-
nally to settle on the economy, with all its gravity, the politics
of distraction reemerged. In the last of the three presidential
debates, McCain repeatedly cited a voter in Toledo, Ohio,
whom he called Joe the Plumber. Before the debate was over,
Epilogue to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition