29.08.2008
What Biden and Palin Have in Common
One quick, random thought about the Sarah Palin veep selection: Half the candidates on the national tickets this year now come from states accounting for a combined 0.5 percent of the national population, which must be (at least according to my quick mental historical survey) a record by a mile. Indeed, it seems rather unlikely that either Palin or Biden would have been elected in the first place in a larger state--Texas and California don't elect 29-year-olds to the Senate or small-town mayors as governor. Somewhere, William Paterson must be smiling.
--Josh Patashnik