The inner cynic conjectures.

Senator Biden:

1) Roundly and soundly rejected for national office by the America populace multiple times, including as recently as this very election cycle.

2) Self-confessed plagiarist.

3) A near-mania for extended and long-winded peroration; for quantity as opposed to quality of argument. Listening is more valuable a quality than lecturing, and one in which he has historically been lacking. Acknowledgment of government by consensus strikes ye old scribe as in woefully short supply.

4) Among the most inside of D.C. insiders, having virtually never worked a day of his adult life outside of the Senate (recall that when elected he was 29 - and had to turn 30 before being eligible for the actual office).

The selection strikes this old scribe as reactive to the McCain campaign in place of proactively setting course ahead. Rather than taking an exit off the standard political highway, the Obama campaign has merely changed lanes.

Governor Palin:

Cannot help but surmise that the most wildly optimistic electoral count projections from the highest levels of the McCain campaign (numbers which only a favored few hold extremely close to the vest) show Alaska as necessary to just top the magic number of 270, that no matter how they view a best-case-scenario dataset it comes out to 268 or 269 without the 49th state.

Due to Alaska’s Sen. Stevens being deeply, deeply mired in scandal (along with the recent scandalous upheavals involving Republicans and entrenched interests in the state house of Alaska), there is a clear and real chance of an anti-Republican backlash in Alaska this year.

Something was needed to attempt to ensure those unusually jeopardized electoral votes.

Mirabile dictu, there exists there a woman G.O.P. governor out of the national spotlight, and with credentials practically as far to the right as the ideology meter will go (Ms. Palin ardently supported and campaigned for Pat Buchanan in 2000 - not just during primaries but also for the general election).

And she recently carried to term a child with Down’s Syndrome, making a choice - a choice which she has clearly stated she would deny and snatch from every other woman in the country if given the power to make it so. In what universe is ultra-self-righteousness in any way deemed any sort of qualification for national political office?

The far-right and the evangelical sectors may not be happy being in bed politically with McCain, but shall fairly slaver over Gov. Palin sharing that timeworn mattress.

Too, she was earlier tightly affiliated with a party calling for the secession of Alaska (which baldly and clearly rejects the designation “American”) — hardly the stuff of the McCain campaign’s heavy-handed “Country First” slogan (and on that subject it remains strangely contradictory in comparison, doesn’t it, that the Constitution to which every national officeholder, to which every member of the military as well swears fealty to puts “We the people” first?).

And let’s face it — Alaska is not a beat to which any of the major media will assign heavyweights or long foot the expense of an ongoing fully-staffed political bureau.

Unlike some other commentators, ye old scribe doesn’t see the selection of Gov. Palin directly as pandering, but as calculated to and driven by the electoral map and the concomitant Arctic wrench thrown into what would normally be a ’safe’ G.O.P. state by the combination of Sen. Stevens’ alleged serious misdeeds and a noted groundswell of nominal support for the Obama campaign, as someone who could slither, like Dan Quayle, under the relatively low bar the major media normally sets for V.P. choices.

Leave us not discount as well that for the past eight years oil, gas and entrenched energy interests have had, at the very least, an open express channel to the White House and the Old Executive Office building, and certainly would be running full tilt to put into place someone like-minded who would guarantee the same full 24/7 priority access for another term.