I think it’s fair to say that presidential candidates and their advisors know this. The tip-a-state factor just doesn’t matter anymore. Partly, this is a function of how blue the blue states are and how red the red states are. (In 2000, a tight popular-vote contest, there were 28 states decided by 10 points or more; in that 1960 election, an equally tight popular-vote contest, there were just 14.) But I think the larger reason for reducing home-state flipping to a second-tier criterion is that the veep selection provides other political assets for the presidential candidate or is used to blunt criticism of that nominee.

Biden is an avuncular, hand-on-the-shoulder senior statesman who lends gravitas, assurance and policy substance to Obama’s ticket, which is why he edged out somebody like Tim Kaine of swing state Virginia. Palin is younger, female, solidly antichoice and tough to criticize on labor issues because of her husband’s background, which is why she edged out somebody like Rob Portman of swing state Ohio.

As John McCain might say, My friends, mark your calendars: The era of the home-state-flipper veep pick is dead.

Palin is a former sports reporter and housewife who became mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, and was elected governor in 2006. She is the mother of five children (named Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig — top that, Gwyneth Paltrow!), the oldest of whom will be deployed to Iraq on Sept. 11 (seriously) and the youngest of whom was born four months ago with Down syndrome. Palin’s decision to continue her pregnancy, despite the fact that the illness was detected in prenatal genetic tests, will be a rallying point for the religious right.

Palin presents some stomach-churning possibilities for Democrats and for the Obama campaign, which has spent the past summer, and especially the past week, wrestling disillusioned women into line after the disappointment of Hillary Clinton’s supercharged but failed presidential bid.

Of course, even a cursory glance at Palin’s positions should be enough to warn Democratic women (and men) to stay far, far away. The governor’s Web site states: “I am pro-life and I believe that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.” Palin is a member of Feminists for Life, and said during her gubernatorial campaign that she is opposed to abortion even in cases of rape and incest. Palin is a lifelong member of the National Rifle Association, and when it comes to healthcare, she says, “I support flexibility in government regulations that allow competition in health care that is needed.”

For the true Hillary holdouts, the handful of so-called PUMAs who spent this week jawing about how they were going to vote for John McCain, these antiwoman stances aren’t likely to make a dent. These agitators will not consider that picking Palin, a politician with only a few years of experience, is a pandering and condescending sop toward them, one that suggests that by dint of her gender alone, Palin could stand in for Clinton, who spent years being fire-forged for her place in history.

Then again, after a week in which Clinton did everything short of standing on her head and humming the Battle Hymn of the Republic to get women fired up and ready to go for Obama, and in which Obama and Joe Biden did their part to provide some thrilling political theater for both sexes, nothing was going to shake these stalwarts, whom Rachel Maddow recently called “post-rational,” from their self-immolating mission.

But even among more reasonable Democrats, the Palin pick does create worries for the still-tender party, not the least of which is that it will reopen a debate about whether Barack Obama should have picked a female vice president, or more specifically, Hillary Clinton.

Biden is a strong candidate for Democratic women, with a good record of supporting reproductive rights and opposing antichoice nominees to the Supreme Court. Biden also wrote the groundbreaking Violence Against Women Act, and is great on the lunch-bucket economic issues so vital to so many American women.

But there was pressure on Obama, especially after the energy (and votes) generated by Clinton’s run, to consider as a running mate Clinton herself, or women like Kathleen Sebelius and Janet Napolitano. He reportedly did not formally vet Clinton, and none of his final top three candidates for the job were female.

The selection of Palin makes it easier to see what the advantages of putting a woman on the Democratic ticket might have been for Obama. McCain likely tapped Palin specifically to battle Obama’s perceived woman problem, and her selection blunts the Obama camp’s argument that McCain has entirely lost his maverick edge. It also keeps Obama’s from being the only history-making candidacy in the voting booth, and allows those undecideds who might have been queasy about Obama’s differences (i.e. race) to funnel guilt about their hesitation into a vote they can tell themselves is socially progressive, and even — ugh — feminist.

During her speech, Palin gave a shout-out to Geraldine Ferraro and cited Clinton’s rallying cry about the 18 million voters who cracked the White House glass ceiling, chillingly promising to break it for her. It was hard not to consider that if elected, Palin will be one health emergency away from becoming our first female president, and to feel frustration at Democrats not only for letting this particular piece of history slip through their fingers but for allowing the work that Clinton and her supporters did to get co-opted by their Republican opponents. If the Palin selection brings female voters to the McCain camp, there is likely to be a round of second-guessing about whether Obama read the tea leaves wrong and missed an opportunity to shore up his divided party more effectively by going with, or at least seriously considering, Clinton.

Palin’s spot on the ticket will also mean the diffusion of feminist energy. Those who monitor gender bias in popular culture and the media are still icing their heads after the exhausting season of Clinton-baiting by the press, and (too) slowly rousting themselves to take on the ugly treatment of Michelle Obama. Now there will also be Sarah Palin to consider, a candidate who represents none of what they believe in, but whose nomination is already highlighting the fact that the Clinton candidacy apparently taught the news media nothing.

Over at CNN, John Roberts on Friday morning was talking about how the major function of a vice president is “to go to funerals,” when he changed his tune about exactly how taxing the position might be. Discussing Palin’s infant, Roberts noted, “Children with Down syndrome require an awful lot of attention and the role of vice president, it seems to me, would take up an awful lot of her time. It raises the issue of how much time will she have to dedicate to her newborn child?”

Dana Bash responded only that while Roberts’ was “a very good question,” she assumed that the McCain camp would wonder whether “if it were a man being picked who also had a baby with Down syndrome, would you also ask the same question?” Bash did not note that moments before, Roberts had been describing the vice presidency as a purely ceremonial position, or point out that Palin has for some time been pulling off the feat of governing a state while lactating (not to mention gestating!).

Meanwhile, over at the supposedly progressive MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell was consumed with one key question: whether Palin would neuter big bad Joe Biden. Forgetting, apparently, that the Delaware senator didn’t seem to be frozen with fear while debating Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Mitchell wondered about how Biden, known for his attack-dog debate style, “can be tough against a woman. Doesn’t it give her a gender advantage?” This was clearly Mitchell’s keenest insight into McCain’s pick, since a few minutes later she repeated, “You can’t be too tough on a woman in a debate, or can you?”

And then there’s the fact that Palin is a very attractive woman, a Tina Fey look-alike who was a runner-up for Miss Alaska in 1984 and, who even before getting picked by McCain, had already been tagged online as a GILF (think MILF except for governors!). And the Wall Street Journal quickly put up a piece about her workout routine and diet. “My ideal fantasy is to be running on a hot dusty road just wearing running shorts and some kind of top that wicks away sweat,” she tells the paper, as well as that “a skinny white-chocolate mocha is my staple in the morning.”

Welcome to the 2008 presidential race, folks, where history gets made about as prettily as sausage.

Liberals quickly piped up. Ezra Klein of the American Prospect expounds on an obvious point: She damn sure isn’t another Dick Cheney. Atrios scoffs at the logic that somehow Palin has more experience than Joe Biden, which would mean, by the transitive property of political math, she has more experience than McCain. The Nation’s John Nichols piles on the inexperience issue, suggesting gender was the key factor here. The Guardian’s Mike Tomasky’s advice: Attack her on ideological grounds.

As for conservatives, Noemie Emery of the Weekly Standard offers a Wilsonian, 14-point “what she does” post delineating Palin’s pluses and minuses. The National Review’s Jack Fowler has met the governor and says her best asset is her likability.

One of her campaign promises in her 2006 run for governor was to “get ANWR open.” Drill here, drill now? As CNBC talk show host Larry Kudlow noted in June, with Sarah Palin it’s “drill, drill, drill — all the way.”

Here’s what she told Kudlow in June:

I think those politicians who don’t understand that we need more domestic supply of energy flowing into our hungry markets, you know, they’re living in La-La Land. And we’re in a world of hurt if their agenda continues to be to lock up these safe, secure domestic supplies of energy.

Remember too Larry, we’re talking about a sliver of the coastal plain of Alaska being explored and drilled for oil. It’s about a footprint of a 2000-acre plot of land. That’s smaller than the footprint of LAX, for instance. So it’s not so grandiose an acreage that it is out of the realm of possibility for others to start understanding why it is that we can do this safely.

The fact that an Alaskan Republican supports expanding drilling for oil is no shocker — so do a majority of Alaskans. But if one of McCain’s most effective thrusts in tightening the presidential campaign over the summer was his opportunistic switch to support offshore drilling, he’s now added a flanker to his team who can push that line with gusto.

Again, from the Ludlow interview:

We sent [Energy] Secretary Bodman overseas the other day, and our president had to visit the Saudis a few weeks ago, to ask them to ramp up development. That’s nonsense. Not when you know that we have the supplies here. You have the supplies in your sister state called Alaska, where we’re ready, willing and we’re able to pump these supplies of energy, flow them into hungry markets across the U.S. We want it to happen. It’s Congress holding us back.

So is Palin Big Oil’s girl? Her supporters will no doubt push back heartily on that accusation, noting that in 2004, she resigned after just 11 months as the head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission because of abuses she witnessed involving other Republican commissioners and their ties to energy companies and energy lobbyists. And as governor, she pushed through a major tax increase on oil companies, that would enable the state government, according to the Seattle Times, “to capture more of the windfall when prices are high.”

Her official statement at the time:

“By receiving an equitable share for our resources, we are now in a position to demand more accountability and seize opportunities to save for future generations.”

That tax increase made her some enemies in the Alaskan oil industry, but right now it makes her look perfect for McCain. Gas prices bothering you? Well, listen to my running mate, who is from Alaska and knows the oil biz inside and out. She says — drill, drill, drill, all the way, and she’s no Big Oil pawn.

How’s the timing? Here’s a manifesto Palin released in July:

Congressional approval of responsible petroleum development in the coastal plain of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) — the most promising unexplored petroleum province in North America — would be of incalculable benefit to my state and our nation.

If we don’t move now to enact an energy policy that includes more oil and gas production from domestic sources, including ANWR and the federal [Outer Continental Shelf] OCS, we may look back someday and realize that we failed to perceive a critical crossroad in the history of this nation. I don’t think it’s overly dramatic to say that our country’s future and the quality of life for every American depends on the decisions that are made or not made in the next few months.