But SNL may also have given her cover on the campaign trail. Fey's Palin is no love letter--falsely confident, hapless, antiscience and calculatedly adorable--but she's harmless compared with the Real Palin we've seen lately: a culture warrior cannily playing on resentments, a mouthpiece for the McCain campaign's ugliest character attacks on Barack Obama.
The same weekend Fey spoofed the former beauty-pageant queen as bringing a flute for the "talent portion" of the debate, Real Palin was blowing a harsher tune. She cast Obama as a suspicious other--"not a man who sees America like you and I see America"--in a line of attack the Associated Press called "racially tinged." Fey's Palin hasn't set up mass viewers to see this side of her--not yet, anyway. It's not the funny, bumbling Sarah we know! We're conditioned to expect her to ask to "phone a friend," not accuse Obama of befriending terrorists. So the Fey version makes it harder to see Palin as an Agnewesque hatchet woman.
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