Republicans like to evoke the imagery of old timey sitcoms I used to watch with my mom, like "Leave It To Beaver" and "Father Knows Best," to tell voters that they understand their aspirations. But the more I think about it, they more they leave me remembering "Green Acres" and "The Honeymooners." Especially since McCain announced his choice for VP.

While I'm living like Trixie Norton (the Cramdens are upstairs, btw, we visit them to watch the cable TV,) the GOP digs up some Eva Gabor ringer with a twang living a K Street vision of the romantically rough, rural lifestyle, and try to pass off that she gives the ticket an understanding of the problems of ordinary people. (Ordinary people like, maybe, the roughly 240 million non-rural US citizens?) I guess that's easier when you have a house and two vacation properties than it is when you have eight houses. But seriously, what regular folks get to shoot moose from a helicopter? Likely more people have rented windsurfing gear on a beach weekend.

Someone whose family clears $200k a year is McCain's idea of how to connect with non-rich voters, the ones making less than $5 million a year. Someone who thinks that rape victims can afford to pay the police to investigate their own attacks is McCain's idea of someone who should inspire the blue collar women that were enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton. While we're losing jobs in existing industries and even Saudi Arabia is beating us to the punch on solar energy, McCain supports cutting off a promising source of new jobs by regularly voting against renewable energy, while his pick for VP vetoed renewable energy projects in Alaska. The Palin family can easily afford five kids and then some, it's not even a financial crisis for them to face the prospect of a teenage parent in the household, while many of my 20 and 30 something friends still rent and can't afford even one child; if this is McCain's idea of a typical family, no wonder he doesn't see what the big deal is about birth control.

Heck, if I had five kids right now, it'd be all PBJs, all the time. And then my high school graduate, stay-at-home mom would lecture me for hours over the phone on whether I remembered how she had me pick out produce with her at the grocery store and made sure every meal included food that had recently been alive. I can hear the words and feel irresponsible just thinking about it. Even though I don't have kids yet. The power of my mother's disapproval reaches across alternate realities. Oh, you know what I'm talking about.

Unfortunately, while the McCain-Palin ticket is used to getting paid to take a lot of time off work the rest of the country is working longer hours and dreading that the next time off they get will be a stint of unemployment, or that their next trip away from home will be due to foreclosure. This summer, a TechRepublic blog identified trends that are making life harder for normal people:

- There are now 3.2 million fewer jobs in this country than in 2000.
- 1 in 5 US workers have been laid off since 2004.
- About 15 million workers are unemployed or underemployed because they can't get a job like they've had in the past.

The Wall Street Journal tells us this week that only those with professional degrees, such as doctors and lawyers, have seen their wages go up recently ...

Every other group, including those with college and doctorate degrees, saw income declines. The inflation-adjusted median salary for a person with a bachelor's degree fell about 3%, adjusted for inflation, to $47,240 last year from 2000. Median master's-degree salaries fell about 4%, to $56,707. Salaries for high school graduates fell about 3%, to $28,290.

... while no one's salaries are keeping up with rising food prices, as the Washington Post pointed out this May:

Since March 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of eggs has jumped 35 percent. A gallon of milk is up 23 percent. A loaf of white bread has climbed 16 percent. And a pound of ground chuck is up 8 percent. Overall, U.S. food prices in 2008 are expected to rise 4 to 5 percent, about double the increases of recent years.

Americans' incomes are falling faster than bread and milk are going up and the McCain campaign thinks it' all in our heads. But we're supposed to believe that Green Acres' Lisa Douglas and her overbearing, email monitoring husband will fight for the change we need, so that a McCain presidency won't be as much of a disaster for us as the Bush presidency has been. Yeah. Sure.

This Trixie Norton says stay out of my living room.

Update [2008-9-11 18:50:45 by Natasha Chart]: Editing and even more proof of how well John McCain relates to women's needs, he voted against Joe Biden's law requiring free rape exams.