Up Next: Clinton Vs. Palin

If you have a moment, take a look at the chart on the Real Clear Politics Web site showing the presidential race polling average. It will tell you at a glance that the last two weeks of hectic politicking have transformed the contest. Senator Obama's thin blue line, that has persistently enjoyed the upper trajectory since April, has taken a precipitous plunge, while Senator McCain's wavy red ribbon has rocketed.

In poker terms, Mr. McCain has enjoyed "position" over Mr. Obama, meaning he has taken key decisions with the benefit of knowing how his opponent has already acted. If you will forgive pursuing the card playing metaphor a little further, when Mr. Obama dealt what he thought was an ace in the hole, Senator Biden, to cover his weakness in foreign affairs and among blue collar workers, Mr. McCain trumped him by playing his queen, Sarah Palin. Her appointment was a gamble that would have made a Mississippi card shark proud and it appears to have paid off handsomely.

It would have been fascinating to watch Hillary Clinton's face when Mr. McCain disclosed that the Alaska governor would be his running mate, for her future now looks considerably more rosy than 10 days ago. Until Mrs. Palin arrived on the scene, Mrs. Clinton was looking forward, rather reluctantly you could not help thinking, to inheriting the mantle of Edward Kennedy, the Big Beast of the Senate. It was her best hope that President Obama would have to defer to her judgment in how best to implement his plans for universal health care, raising taxes on the rich, and the rest.

But what once seemed likely now seems far less so. Indeed, the odds have swung violently in Mr. McCain's favor in just a few days, not least thanks to his grasping the lessons of Mrs. Clinton's bruising primary campaign that exposed so starkly the parts of America Mr. Obama still struggles to reach. One of the most impressive elements of Mrs. Clinton's journey from Iowa to Puerto Rico was how she successfully remade herself as Rosie the Riveter when she found she had lost the faculty lounge liberals to her rival.

Mr. Biden was put on the ticket to persuade blue collar voters that, notwithstanding Mr. Obama's failure to connect with them, the Democratic Party had their best interests at heart. But the amiable Mr. Biden, who in his decades in the Senate has shown a marked penchant for being liked, is no match for the free punching Mrs. Palin. Polling over the last week has shown not only that working women admire her spunky approach to work and life and family, but that their hard nosed, hard working husbands do even more.

There must have been a satisfying flash of understanding that passed between the Clintons, much maligned by Mr. Obama's people, when Mrs. Palin came out swinging in St. Paul last week. We can take with a cellar of salt stories about Mrs. Clinton taking on Mrs. Palin in the key blue collar battlegrounds. There will be no catfight. Instead the New York senator may be forgiven if she finds more urgent ways of spending her time, like pressing wild flowers or darning her husband's socks. Better still, she should take a well deserved vacation, for, starting the day after the election, she may well have to begin running again for the presidency.

Mrs. Clinton will not have to make the obvious points: that if the Democrats had genuinely wanted to win they would have picked her over Mr. Obama, and that had Mr. Obama genuinely wanted to win he would have picked her over Mr. Biden. The polls clearly show that if it were Mrs. Clinton versus Mr. McCain, or indeed Mrs. Clinton versus Mrs. Palin, the senator of New York would be sitting in the Oval Office come January. There will be no need to say I told you so, tempting though that may be.

Nor will there be any need to rebuke the women's groups who supported Mrs. Clinton for years before they defected at the last moment to Mr. Obama. The consequence of their treachery is to have emboldened Mr. McCain, in the absence of Mrs. Clinton, to elevate a working mother of five who owes nothing to reproductive rights campaigners and even less to the theoretical feminists who for decades have chosen to ponder whether manholes should be better termed personholes. Like Lady Thatcher, Mrs. Palin can rightly ask, what has feminism ever done for me?

An all woman election is now on the cards for 2012. Whoever (save Senator Lieberman) Mr. McCain chose as his running mate was to be given first crack at the election in the Republican interest after he retired. And as Mr. McCain approaches his 77th year, he may well think it wise to step aside in favor of his most unlikely protégé. If Mrs. Palin makes good on her promise to shake up the Republican establishment that has given conservatism such a bad name these last eight years, she will deserve to inherit Mr. McCain's maverick mantle.

As she slowly makes her mark on national life, Mrs. Palin will, to some degree, be doing Mrs. Clinton, and women in general, a service, despite holding views on abortion that many find repugnant. The thinly veiled male chauvinism that dogged the Democratic primaries, both in the press and on the doorstep, will be dealt a fatal blow by the presence of a feisty woman at the heart of government.

nwapshott@nysun.com