Spotted on Philly’s Action News this morning: a news report saying first what speeches Obama and Palin gave yesterday, followed by news about what Biden and McCain were up to. Interesting match up, and indicative of a sort of political dyslexia going on about who exactly is running for the presidency.

Some of my regular readers might be surprised to hear that I think that this is proper, to some extent, thanks to an actuarial tidbit I heard reported the other day: a 72-year-old man has, on average, a 1 in 3 chance of making it to 80. Or, put another way, the odds are 2 out of 3 that a McCain vice-president will assume the presidency if he is elected to two terms. I’m tempted to do some research about what the odds are that he’ll see 76, but considering that we’re talking about a septuagenarian who has had cancer and has spent time in a prison camp, I’m not sure how relevant averages are to the complete story. (And, to be fair, his mother is well into her 90s, which makes predictions even more difficult.)

So I would love to hear much more discussion about the fact that electing the Republican ticket makes it quite likely that we’re electing two presidents: a McCain presidency followed by a Palin presidency. Open debate about this could go either way: I expect that it would make the Christian Right moose dressing faction even more rapturous, as it were, about electing them to office, but considering how much of our political debate has been dominated by the War on Lack of Fear on Terror in the last seven years, I wonder how many people are giving any consideration to the possibility of having President Palin running the show in six months.