Since everyone else is putting their two cents into the Vice Presidents pick, we at The Party of Common Sense thought we'd deliver our analysis too. But first let’s look at the campaign themes to see if how each candidate does to hurt or help the ticket.

In advertising there is something called the KSP or Key Selling Point. If there is one and only thing you want a listener to take away from a conversation, what would that be? When the Republican strategist looked for a key advantage, they saw it in McCain's name and Obama's newness on the scene - after all, with the exception of a keynote address at Kerry's convention, most people haven't heard of Barack Obama prior to this campaign. Just like you don't have to follow football to recognize the name Bret Farve, you don't have to follow politics to have heard John McCain's name at some point during his 27 years of politics or his 2000 Presidential race. He's a known entity and they are calling this "experience" (a bit of a take off of Hillary's successful strategy stating she was ready to lead in day one of her presidency, unlike Barack Obama). You'll hear Republicans talk up McCain and create fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Obama. You don't have to be in advertising to know how this works. Advertisers call it brand awareness and it's just like when you are in the supermarket in front a dizzying array of products and you have to make a decision. The advertisers want to you pick their product because somewhere you heard something about it in a good context (which is why product placements in movies work). Likewise, when voters go to the polls and do the gut check to see which lever to pull, they want it to be McCain's because he the rock-solid, safe choice they've heard of.

On the other side of the aisle, the Democrat's selling point was easy. Bush has record low ratings, we're going on six years of war, we're in an energy crisis, the economy is in trouble, unemployment is up, we've got a housing crisis, and most people think America is on the wrong track. The Republicans dominated Congress and the White House during most of this time, and therefore have shouldered most of the blame for the current state of affairs. The democrats theme is change - McCain represents four more years of failed Republican policies.

So in that context, the democrat's choice, Joe Biden was fairly safe. He provides some additional experience and name recognition to the ticket to blunt the "experience" theme that's core to the Republican strategy. He's got some foreign policy experience, but on the down side he doesn't do much to make amends with the Hillary faction.

On the Republican side it get much more interesting. The pick of Sarah Palin, seems to be part of larger shift in strategy for the Republicans. Political candidates traditionally have migrated to the center during a political campaign - the idea is to pick off your opponent's voters, or at least capture the undecided voters. Karl Rove was a brilliant strategist and realized that rather than fight over the few million voters in the center, you could concede them to your opponent. Since only approximately 50% of those eligible actually vote in an election, assuming those that don't vote would be approximately split between Republicans and Democrats, there are around 80 million potential Republican voters that don't vote. His strategy, which has been termed "rallying the base" was to give those voters that wouldn't have voted in the past, a reason to go out and vote. This was a successful strategy for Bush in 2000 and 2004 and many of McCain's advisors want to repeat that success by using this same winning recipe. So we've seen McCain move right. Whereas he voted against Bush tax cuts, now they are indispensible and should be made permanent. He has taken a harder line on abortion, same sex marriage and immigration. He used to be against drilling and for protecting the environment and now he's all about "drill, drill, drill". It was rumored that Senator Joe Liberman was McCain's first choice as a Vice President running mate. Once again, McCain's gut wanted him to move to the center, to reach across the aisle, but his advisors talked him out of it and they compromised on Sarah Palin. For the advisors, it was all about this shift to rally the base. For McCain it may have been more about his own Maverick image - picking someone beside the old, rich, white guy that has dominated Republican politics. Especially in light of McCain's age and past medical history, Palin's selection does hurt their campaign theme of 'experience'. Now when they claim Barrack is inexperienced, the Democrats have a readymade answer: Palin. Prior to being picked, Palin was virtually unknown and there is an unusually short time between the selection and the election. The question is: will voters have a chance to get to know Sarah Palin (or at least enough time to think they know her) and will they like her? Or did the Republicans hurt themselves by muddying the water on the experience theme? McCain's gut feel to pick someone out of the traditional mold is dead on - by visually breaking the stereotype image of the Republican politico, they create some space between the Republican party ways of the past, thereby dulling the Democrats theme of "change". The real question is: will this work? By picking Palin with her social conservative views, McCain has committed to the Rove strategy: give up the middle to capture the base. There are two dangers here. The first is a possibility that Palin is conservative enough to turn off the centrists, and McCain at the top of the ticket doesn’t have strong enough conservative credentials to bring out the base - thereby resulting in a McCain/Palin ticket capturing neither group. The second is that McCain, who has reached across the aisle in the past, who has shown to be historically to hold centrist and progressive views, and who values integrity and principles, will wake up one day, look in the mirror, and not like what the Republican machine has turned him into, and the campaign will implode.

It should be an interesting election. The Republicans definitely threw the long ball on this one, will it be caught for a touchdown to win the game, or will it be dropped? We'll see in November.