September 9, 2008 | 9:13 p.m

Femocracy ’08

By Doree Shafrir

“I understand the Republicans are excited by her,” said 23-year-old Niki Castle the other day. “It’s why all my South Carolina friends have ‘I want to be Sarah Palin when I grow up’ as their Facebook status updates! She’s a mother of five and she’s making a run for the biggest house in the world.”

Ms. Castle, who grew up in Greenville, S.C., works in Manhattan as an assistant at a literary agency. “For all the faulting that Obama gets for being such a charismatic speaker, she’s got that same charismatic ability,” she said. “My conservative friends, who think abortion should be illegal, think Sarah Palin is on the forefront of standing by that policy in her own family, with her pregnancy and her daughter’s. The part where I sort of shake my head is that she doesn’t agree with birth control, but she does agree with forcing her daughter to get married?”

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Rrrowl! My Couture Romp Ruined by Caribou Frau

By Simon Doonan

On Thursday, Sept. 4, before hitting the Bryant Park shows, I made a beeline for my neighborhood optician to check up on business. I had expected to see hordes of women snapping up those smart-lady Tina Fey glasses, the very same ones that had endowed Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for vice president of the United States, with such an air of faux gravitas the night before. Thirty-seven million people of varying political persuasions watched the bespectacled Alaskan overachiever deliver her acceptance speech! Eyewear, and the unwitting marketing thereof, has never loomed larger on the American landscape. If this political stuff does not work out, Ms. Palin is definitely in the running to become America’s next top eyewear model: not Miss Congeniality, but Ms. LensCrafters. Anybody can see that.

And let’s call a spade a spade: The having-it-all hockey mom was mesmerizing, albeit in a hilarious, if-John-Waters-had-invented-a-Republican kind of a way. If Sarah Palin weren’t anti-choice, anti-Darwin, anti-gay marriage, and overly fond of killing large animals with horns, then I would definitely vote for her. I would plonk her caribou-skinnin’ ass in the Oval Office in a hot second. But she is and therefore I’m not.

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