I went to a book party* given for the TV hero Bob Schieffer last Friday and every single person I knew who entered, all media sophisticates, came up to me and asked plaintively, "Well, what do you think about Sarah Palin?"

Then, I can’t tell you how many suffering Dems contacted me in the last 48 hours and said, "Is there any possibility that Joe Biden would step aside and let Barack Obama now make Hillary Clinton his vice president?" 

Well, the answer has to be no. How would THAT make Obama look? (Like the jerk he is for not embracing Hillary in the first place.) But I guess it aroused wishful hoping after Joe Biden himself — a really good guy — asserted that Hillary would probably have been a better choice than he was.

Vice President Palin — for I fear that is what she will become — has a built-in "second" in comedian Tina Fey. Tina looked more like Palin than Palin does on "Saturday Night Live" and even has the Alaska governor’s flat vocal pattern down pat.

And you have to stand amazed that an actor could get an unknown person down so correctly that at this point, you honestly probably couldn’t tell them apart.

Just a few years late, I finally went to see the musical "Wicked" over last weekend and its presentation onstage of the Wizard of Oz made me think. When you see John McCain and Sarah Palin together, they look for all the world like the bluffing faking wizard and Judy Garland, intrepid and brave as Dorothy. Or they resemble a doting grandpa looking on as his little darling takes center stage. Voters have to remember if they choose the McCain-Palin ticket, they’ll most likely be voting Sarah Palin into the office of president of the U.S. in this election. 

Speaking of "Wicked," where the bad and good witch are just sisters under the skin, reminded me of the teacher who asked her young class to write an essay about Red Riding Hood. The class protested that the tale was too well-known; what could they say? The teacher then told them, "Yes, but I want you to write it now from the point of view of the wolf!"

I have to compliment the excellent Tom Friedman’s op-ed column in The New York Times last weekend. Everything in the Times is pointedly and intelligently leveled against the election of John McCain and Sarah Palin, so, of course, detractors deem it biased and too liberal. But Friedman taking on McCain’s "drill, drill, drill" mania for offshore oil "now" cited this as total dinosaur thinking.

Urging invention and new techniques to find other energy than oil and saying that McCain’s ideas simply feed America’s oil mania – he noted that this policy is like urging people to make more typewriters in a time when the Internet and computer technology has already rendered typewriters obsolete. It’s a great piece of thinking and writing.

*By the way, Bob’s book is titled Bob Schieffer’s America and brings together 171 of his best essays done on CBS. And, if you thought Schieffer and Katie Couric were bitter enemies, as they say in network gossip, there she was, enthusiastic and chowing down on barbecue, celebrating Bob at Manhattan’s Hill Country honky-tonk café on West 26th Street.