Andrew Malcolm, amidst an extremely weird post on Sarah Palin, snarks that Palin should "let slip something about her home state being 279 times larger than, say, Delaware." What is it with the conservative obsessions with acreage? Alaska may be 279 times larger than Delaware, but Delaware has more people than Alaska. About 200,000 of them. And governors, in general, manage problems having to do with people. You saw this after the 2004 election, too, when conservatives were obsessing over red/blue maps that showed the vast majority of the country's land mass voting for George W. Bush, even as he won only slightly more than half of its voters. It's like they never got over seeing property ownership cleaved from the franchise, and still dream of the day when elections will be decided via a straightforward comparison of real estate holdings. That, at least, is an election McCain would win.
