For the moment, Obama and Palin divide the electorate, and are bound by a strange symmetry: born in the nineteen-sixties, the only candidates from outside the Lower 48 ever to grace national tickets, and the beneficiaries of powerful social movements that they were too young to have participated in (civil rights in Obama’s case, women’s liberation in Palin’s). Just as Obama, with his “post-racial” affect and his Ivy League pedigree, made an older African-American political figure like Jesse Jackson seem the relic of a vanished era, so Palin—with her lustrous mane and form-fitting skirts, her coddling of her infant son in the full glare of TV cameras—presented a new model of the spontaneous woman politician, free of the overmanaged self-discipline that constrains Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi.

What Palin doesn’t have is a serious program. Her book offers only the conservative dogmas of the moment—the sins of big government, the glories of the free market, the greatness of America. This isn’t altogether surprising. Obama—himself no stranger to the political uses of the book tour—was also accused of being stronger on rhetoric than on policy detail, not least by Hillary Clinton during the primaries. Almost a year into his Presidency, we now see his intentions more clearly. He means to usher in the third phase of liberal reform that began with the New Deal and continued with the New Frontier–Great Society initiatives. But these ambitions were given shape by the conditions he inherited upon taking office, and could be glimpsed only tenuously from his apprenticeship as a state legislator and then a U.S. senator…

To an extent unmatched by any recent major political figure, she offers the erasure of any distinction—in skill, experience, intellect—between the governing and the governed. As one supporter told Conroy and Walshe, “If she can run a home, she can run the government.” Palin agrees: “There’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood.” Describing the responsibilities of managing Alaska’s budget, she makes the same argument in fancier language: “Lessons learned on the micro level still apply to the macro. Just as my family couldn’t fund every item on our wish list, and had to live within our means as well as save for the future, I felt we needed to do that for the state.” Her insistent ordinariness is an expression not of humility but of egotism, the certitude that simply being herself, in whatever unfinished condition, will always be good enough.