John McCain's selection of hockey mom Sarah Palin as his running mate is an unusual one, to say the least.  After initially extreme reactions from both the right and left (i.e., embarrassment vs. various forms of spit-take), the narrative machines soon got traction, steering the discussion into more familiar territory.  So a pick that looked explosive at first blush may ultimately turn out to be a non-issue.  We'll see.  But in the meantime, let's look at just what was accomplished with the Palin pick, with special attention to the trap aspect.

Palin does several things for McCain, all of which have been duly noted in mainstream coverage:

• She "shores up" McCain's conservative base.  She is pro-gun, pro-God, and anti-abortion.  She says the right things about Big Guvmint waste and the East Coast elite, lending an outsider aura to a candidate who's been skulking around Washington for the last 26 years. 
• She lends an Everyman feel to a campaign that was trying hard to shed an emerging theme: McCain as a multi-millionaire, don't-know-how-many-houses-I-own type of guy.  Conservative radio talkers are already touting Palin as a "normal" person, more in touch with regular folks on the ground than the ethereal Obama.  This is a sticky point for McCain, because he can't directly bash Obama as an elitist since he himself is a sub-mediocre Dubya-ish legacy, riding his father and grandfather's coattails through life before glomming on to sugarmomma Cindy.
• The choice of Palin itself reestablishes McCain's somewhat tarnished "maverick" image.  In the past, of course, McCain was a bit of a maverick, hewing to the left of his own party on immigration, abortion, campaign finance, and tax cuts for the wealthy.  But in remaking himself for this Presidential run, he has flip-flopped over to the purely conservative line on virtually everything, a phenomenon which Obama and Biden hammered home at the Democratic convention last week, noting McCain's mirroring of President Bush's agenda over 90% of the time.  Palin is a signal that there's some contrariness left in the old galoot.
• She's young.  It must have become obvious at some point in the McCain camp that their guy was just too old to convey the sense that he understands the challenges that young people face in today's fast-changing landscape.  Even middle-age folks and the alert elderly can sense that there are some profoundly different problems lurking on the horizon, even if they don't understand them (global warming, peak oil, the rise of China, etc.).  And no matter how forward-thinking or innovative McCain's policy proposals might be (which they're not, but just pretend for a minute), you just can't shake the general sense that new thinking doesn't come out of ancient brains.  Enter Palin, who instantly makes the McCain ticket vibrant and sexy.

There are certainly more advantages that Palin brings to McCain (disgruntled Hilary voters, union sympathizers who might idolize Alaska's First Dude, etc.), but you get the idea.  In many ways, she is a great compliment to the Paleolithic Senator.  But the most intriguing thing about this choice is that it's a trap.  It is a ruse to bait the Obama crowd into talking about the dreaded E-word, Experience.  Liberals might scoff at this as backwards.  It is McCain, after all, who has been pounding on Obama's inexperience, following the lead of Hilary Clinton.  The selection of Palin thus seems to be the supreme hypocrisy.  How can he bash Obama as a greenhorn, and then go out and select someone of Palin's pedigree?   

But that misses the point of the trap.  That is a logical liberal approach to the situation, and logic rarely finds a home in Presidential politics. This trap is an unabashed invitation for Democrats to jump into the experience debate. It's an asymmetrical willingness to exchange a VP's credibility for a POTUS's.  After all, as the old adage goes, people don't vote for the Vice President.  They're voting for the Big Dog, the top job.  If Democrats get drawn into criticizing Palin as too inexperienced, they will have wounded their own guy at his weakest point. 

The more you think about it, it's a great strategy, a no-lose for the GOP.  If no huge battle over the experience factor arises, then all of the above Palin advantages kick in.  If the Dems want to open the experience debate, then the GOP can essentially do the pawn-queen exchange (Obama being the queen in this case, but nothing should be read into that).  The Republicans will gladly allow their VP candidate be disparaged if it means that the top guy on the Dem ticket will get the same treatment.  And in fact, I heard it described explicitly like that on talk radio, as trading a backup QB injury for a starting QB injury.  It's a no-brainer. And speaking of talk radio, the immediate lunge to this exact experience-debate script tells me that the Palin pick was absolutely designed, at least in part, as a trap.  We all know how closely conservative pundits stick to the approved story lines, so the fact that they are all trumpeting "bring it on" regarding Palin's inexperience, as opposed to hanging their head in shame at McCain's hypocrisy, is a dead giveaway. 

Dems should be very wary of this ruse. They should avoid the experience trap and generally ignore Palin altogether.  After all, people vote for the Big Cheese, not the VP, as mentioned above.  So Dems should just continue to hammer on McCain as the representative of an utterly discredited and failed conservative legacy.  If I was a liberal strategist, I would just pound McCain as another Bush, a mediocre and intellectually incurious person (the guy graduated 894th out of 899 at Annapolis, for God's sake).  Is that really what the country needs, another dimwitted patriot?  Can we afford to face the challenges of the 21st century with a leader who doesn't use a computer and who views the world through a psychotic POW template?  It's time for some straight-talk on this fake maverick.  Forget Palin, concentrate on McCain.  That will put Obama in the White House.