Oh, c’mon all you children of 1970s network television (or 1980s and 1990s syndicated cable reruns); you remember this one, don’t you? You must – it was a “very special episode” after all. Or maybe I’m making it all up. Anyway, here’s how I remember it.

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Perennial second-tier, wannabe loser, middle sister Jan, is thrilled. After years in middle school and high school student council, she is surprised to find herself emerging as a candidate for student body president. Everything would be peachy except older sister Marcia, who only got elected to student council that fall in order to give her one more extracurricular on her college application, has decided she is running too.

Jan knows very well from experience how this is going to turn out and it’s not fair!

Jan is one of the most experienced members of student council and Marcia is a flashy newbie.

Jan has a long record of legislative accomplishments. She consistently fought pork, advocating all-kosher meals in the school cafeteria. “You can put lipstick on a pig,” she is fond of saying, “but it still doesn’t taste like chicken.” She reached across the aisle and helped broker a major compromise regarding appointment of judges to school traffic court. She even stood up to her own clique and argued that girls with poor fashion sense did not necessarily belong in the special education class.

True, Marcia did volunteer her time tutoring students who were struggling academically and did organize a hot lunch program within the community for kids whose families otherwise could not have afforded them. But Jan does not see how these things could possibly compare with her own past vocations as a hall monitor and corresponding secretary to the PTA. I mean, Jan’s were real student government positions while Marcia’s stuff were just piffle. Jan always assumed charity work was what losers did to pass the time after they lost elections.

Jan is even something of a school hero. While on a volunteer mission to infiltrate archrival Ho Chi Minh High and steal the gorilla mascot costume of the “Fighting Kong,” a bunch of bad kids captured Jan, held her against her will, and tortured her (although this is another “very special” episode). Jan cannot even raise her arm in class anymore when the teacher asks who knows the answer because of injuries she received. Marcia’s only injury was when Greg and Peter accidentally smashed in her nose with a football.

None of this seems to matter, however. Jan’s campaign pep rallies only draw small, dispirited crowds. Marcia’s pep rallies are huge, with adoring fans cheering her every insipid word. Why, her latest one was so big they held it outdoors in the football stadium. There were even fireworks and Davey Jones came and performed a song.

This isn’t what elections are supposed to be about, Jan fumes to herself. Elections are supposed to be about recognizing and rewarding those who have put in their time and paid their dues. Marcia is turning this whole thing into a popularity contest. Marcia always wins popularity contests.

Why, oh why, must everything be Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!?

Jan realizes that if her familial foe has one weakness, it is her choice for vice-presidential running mate. Marcia has predictably picked her dorky boyfriend Wally. He is dependable and intelligent but kind of clumsy and nerdy. Nobody can figure out what Marcia sees in this guy.

Looking over the student body, Jan hits upon the choice of Sammy Tanner. He doesn’t have much student council experience but who cares – Sammy is captain of the football team, dreamy-looking, and every bit as popular as Marcia. Yet he isn’t stuck-up at all, actually speaking civilly to Jan instead of calling her a second tier, wannabe loser.

Jan goes to Sammy, tells him her tale of woe, and asks him to be her running mate. Sammy rubs his chiseled jaw thoughtfully and nods. “You’re right, Jan,” he says. “It isn’t fair and I’m flattered that you’d come to me for help. Of course, I’ll join your ticket. We’ll teach Marcia a lesson.”

With Roger on her side, everything changes overnight. Suddenly Jan is the one with huge pep rallies and all the excitement. Marcia is suddenly old news and left befuddled by the reversal of fortunes. Jan is elated. Victory is hers! Jan is delighted. Marcia is going down! Jan is thrilled. This is exactly what she has always wanted!

Except . . .

Jan is increasingly starting to get the feeling this is less her campaign and more Sammy’s.

Their rallies follow a predictable pattern. The crowd chants for Sammy, who gives a standard speech about how Jan and he will build a bridge to the Twenty-First Century, as opposed to Marcia, who will build a bridge to nowhere. The crowds go wild when Sammy concludes with a smirk, “Thanks but no thanks for that bridge to nowhere, Marcia.” Then he introduced Jan to big applause but when she tries to talks about the issues, the crowd is soon chanting for Sammy again.

Jan’s gratitude toward Sammy begins to take on an edge of resentment that soon blossoms into full-scale jealousy. Finally, desperate and heartsick, Jan goes to her parents and lays out the whole story for them.

“All I wanted was to stop hearing ‘Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!’ all the time but now all I hear is ‘Sammy, Sammy, Sammy!’ and it’s just as bad. I’ve created a monster. What am I going to do?”

As Carol nods sagely, Mike gently but firmly suggests to Jan that maybe the reason she is feeling such remorse now is that she chose Sammy for all the wrong reasons. In her desire to beat her older sister, Jan ceased to fight for the type of election she believed in and instead turned it even more into the very thing she hates the most – a popularity contest.

In the final scene, Jan tearfully addresses the school at an assembly and apologizes for letting them – and herself – down. She turns over her candidacy to Sammy and dejectedly walks out of the auditorium, as Mike and Carol look on ruefully but proudly from the wings. And everybody learns a valuable lesson . . . except for Bobby and Cindy, who both tragically died of exhaustion trying to set the world record for longest continuous teeter-tootering while all of this other silliness was going on.

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I grant you that the Brady Bunch had little enough to do with real life back when it was first on the air, let alone political life in 2008. The only lesson John McCain is likely to learn is that you can’t get the liars out of government unless you first get elected by lying. If successful, whether the latter will allow him to accomplish the former or winds up being the very thing preventing him remains to be seen.

McCain, I am quite sure, is only too glad to have Palin on his ticket. She has solidified, even electrified, his base and created excitement in a campaign that had been wandering about aimlessly before her addition. They are likely to continue appearing together as frequently as for as long as possible.

I am equally sure that McCain loves seeing Obama and his campaign so perplexed over how to handle Palin. Every day Obama spends on defense against her instead of going after McCain on the issues is a good day for McCain.

Still, I cannot help but wonder. The Republican crowds are cheering her name and not McCain’s own. The media is so obsessed with her, it has forgotten about McCain just about as much as it has about Obama. His followers genuinely respect him but it is her they love and view as “one of them” in a way they never accepted him. Her picture appears on all the magazine covers, even the ones that juxtapose it against Obama’s image.

McCain is tough; he spent five and half years in a Hanoi cell, as he likes to remind us on every possible occasion. He can take playing second fiddle to the bottom half of his ticket for the next six weeks and even the next four years if this gets him what he wants.

Yet for a guy who for so long was a media darling himself, who takes great pride in his political independence, and who seems if not to dislike Obama, then to genuinely resent his rapid rise to Presidential candidacy as undeserved – for a guy like that, watching another ingénue to the national scene upstage him and knowing any success he will achieve may be on her coattails instead of the other way around . . .

Well, I just can’t help but wonder that when all the cameras are gone and the lights are dimmed and even the closest advisors have left his hotel room, whether McCain doesn’t find himself staring at his reflection in the mirror and muttering to himself,

Why, oh why, must everything be Sarah, Sarah, Sarah!?

Jan's student council team has been highly successful for the past eight years, constantly getting elected, sometimes in blowouts, and sometimes by the slimmest and unlikliest of margins. Some of those were really close indeed, like in the pep rally they organized vs. Baltimore High School last year, when the good old Red White and Blue High might not actually have cheered louder, but they got some really lucky judgements from the teachers at the very end. They won every election event last year except the very last one, but even that felt like a fluke. Everybody wonders if it's Jan that's been buoying the team for the last eight years, or if it's all the careful control that her faculty advisors exert over the student council program.

Jan started the fall campaign pretty well, really going to prove something, with lots of posters on the wall, and the candy sale went super. But then she got in an accident at home and tore her anterior cruciate ligament. Now Cindy is helping out. That cute little rugrat, Cindy! I mean, people sort of like her, but Cindy in charge? She hasn't shown much promise, and she's just a little kid. And somehow they're still winning elections, but in honesty, the opponents' appeal has probably been overstated, and the question's still out. Jan puts a happy face along the sidelines, shaking hands, being the politician, but you know she really wants to be out there gettting the votes herself.

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Yeah, I know it doesn't quite follow the character. Couldn't help myself.

Bell, I think the sheer unexpectedness of humor coming out of you is what makes it really funny. Your last post was great too.

Is a very perceptive note in your piece. If McCain is successful it is unlikely that the ticked would have much in the way of coat tails translating to other races given the attraction of Palin and the tenor of issues in those other close states.

More to the point—what really has ‘coat tails’ in the sense of pull through effect for politicians is the economy. It’s cliché to discuss it as the single most important issue but it’s really the equivalent of the way Rove used to harp on fears over 9-11 or boys kissing. Only this fear is real.

The events overnight in the financial markets and the shake out over the coming weeks (watch the 401k hits, mortgage rates, job losses and housing values) does two important things. First—it makes people’s sphincter tighten and focus on what they care admittedly care about most and the reality is most people trust Democrats more on the economy than they do Republicans (who in the eyes of the average voter, rightly or wrongly, got us into this mess). Second—it shifts the dialogue away from Palin and the momentum of the McCain campaign and the subsequent energizing of the base and their various faux outrages to the economy and the ‘are you better off question’ and underscores change. A decidedly unwelcome shift for McCain. The media, starved for a story as they always are, just got a more interesting train wreck that they can’t look away from—they’re peering at the carnage now and echoing how awful it is even as their stomachs churn.

They are unlikely to change the topic soon and it’s likely to goose Obama’s support as well—the shape and size of which we don’t really know.

Of all the Rovian plays. Who’d have thought that scaring the pants off of people would be the game changer—and that they’d call it for the other side. It’s like watching Buffalo catch Seattle sleeping the weekend before last and have a punt holder deliver a 19 yard pass to an untouched wideout that nobody was watching line up and run into the end zone.

Senator John McCain (R-Media) has it in spades. He's running for president, after all, and that requires a massive ego. However, while he may have created a monster, the fact remains that said monster is his creation. He obviously takes pride in seeing his decision pay off. Nothing strokes the ego of a gambler so much as being right when everyone else was wrong ('crazy, reckless old coot! what is he thinking? is he senile?').

That said, a veep only has as much power as a president allows her to have. After the election, it will be the McCain administration. Though she does look good in black, so those foreign funerals will be crawling with paparazzi.

if the decision to go with Palin was McCain's at all. Nice spin, though. He didn't so much create the monster as acquiesced in its creation. He's mortgaged his soul in so many ways, when he gets into office, he may realize that he has no political capital at all. He will be beholden to the base which hated him so much until he brought Palin in. He's not going to "go maverick" on them at that point, or they'll make sure the name McCain forever goes down in infamy.

To the base, this is the beginning of the Palin presidency, with McCain as a weak placeholder for the next four years.

Hi, Keifus. There's just something about the Bradys that makes them rife for parody, isn't there. I think its because lots of people liked the show, silly as it was, but are embarassed to admit it. In any case, thanks for your kind words about my efforts and my thanks to you for your own take on them.

Hi, Demosthenes2. I hope you are right about voters wising up about the need to change economic policies and how that would benefit Democrats. I'm more pessimistic these days by the way so many are switching their trust to McCain even as the facts show the policies he will bring to the table are the very ones that caused the problems in the first place. He is singing a siren song, consisting of three verses (he'll cut waste, he won't raise taxes, and he'll reduce the price of gas about a week after taking office) that many seem inclined to believe. As I posted earlier this year, people fear change even as they see the need for it. And since McCain switched his message from experience to change, voters seem inclined to vote for the version of change that has a face they feel more comfortable with, even if the "change" that face is bringing will bring them no comfort at all. I remain hopeful but the economy is not the only arena with meanacing signs looming. Thanks for your reply.

Hi, Urquhart. You have a point about Veeps but I wonder how much power McCain will actually have in a McCain White House. If he had bucked his Party and run as a maverick on the issues, pulling them toward moderation with them, he might have the pull to say, "I got Republicans back in the White House -- you owe me for showing you the way."

But while the choice of Palin has undoubtedly created excitement both inside the GOP and beyond, it also cements McCain's choice to embrace the policies of the past eight years and run on them. If that works and he is elected, what will happen if he tries to really push some of the things he had traditionally bucked the Party over, like immigration. Those GOP Senators and Reps are going to laugh their asses off at him and say, "John, we love ya buddy. You're one of us. But you couldn't get elected running on that shit! You had to bring in a charismatic neocon from Alaska to fire up the base and fool the Independents. Now that you're finally in the Oval Office, what makes you think we're gonna put our seats at risk to carry water for you on policies our constituents think are just a step above socialism?"

Just a thought. Thanks for your reply.

They only fear change when it appears more frightening than the current circumstance. The average doesn’t think much behind the current pain threshold. Today, it got pretty bad and worrisome for… well… everybody. That’s what will shift the dialogue and be on voter’s minds come November.