So take that Joe Biden!
Paglia was quite struck by Palin and was shocked that McCain would make such a bold pick. She had thought that the election was over after Obama’s speech:

After that extravaganza, marking the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s epochal civil rights speech on the Washington Mall, I felt calmly confident that the Obama campaign was going to roll like a gorgeous juggernaut right over the puny, fossilized McCain. The next morning, it was as if the election were already over. No need to fret about American politics anymore this year. I had already turned with relief to other matters.
Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy — one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama’s triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football — or one of the great light-saber duels in “Star Wars.” (Here are the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn, going at it with Darth Maul in “The Phantom Menace.”) This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.
Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

If you haven’t read the whole article, make sure you do because she makes some really interesting observations throughout the article (and some pretty shocking ones).
Including this:

It’s heavy weather for Obama fans, as momentum has suddenly shifted to John McCain — that hoary, barnacle-encrusted tub that many Democrats like me had thought was full of holes and swirling to its doom in the inky depths of Republican incoherence and fratricide. Gee whilikers, the McCain vampire just won’t die! Hit him with a hammer, and he explodes like a jellyfish into a hundred hungry pieces.

This is why I like Paglia, she is brutally honest! And man! I really feel her pain on this one since I felt the same way when McCain was the victor of the Republican primaries (“Oh no! I thought he was dead! What the heck happened?”)
And she is right on target in her assessment of Obama’s performance recently (with his downfall starting at Saddleback):

I must admit that McCain is currently eating Obama’s lunch. McCain’s weirdly disconnected persona (beady glowers flashing to frozen grins and back again) has started to look more testosterone-rich than Obama’s easy, lanky, reflective candor. What in the world possessed the Obama campaign to let their guy wander like a dazed lamb into a snake pit of religious inquisition like Rick Warren’s public forum last month at his Saddleback Church in California? That shambles of a performance — where a surprisingly unprepared Obama met the inevitable question about abortion with shockingly curt glibness — began his alarming slide.

But this is just out there and I’m in shock that she’s being this honest:

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman’s body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman’s entrance into society and citizenship.
On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?

Wow! Not too many Democrats would admit that.
And here’s another shock coming from a feminist:

It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism — one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.
But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.

Two of the main reason I rejected feminism when I was growing up in the 70’s and in my adulthood in the 80’s was their strident support of abortion and their victim mentality. I didn’t feel like I was oppressed, I felt like I could do whatever I set my mind to and wasn’t going to let some misogynist stand in my way.
Palin strikes me as my type of feminist, one who isn’t at war with her family but is working to make this world better for them (evidenced by the fact that she started her political career at the PTA). Who can stand up to the old boys network and triumph over them. Who is well spoken, brilliant and is gifted in politics, able to connect with her audience and convince them that she’s one of them and therefore knows what they want. Who is pro-life in her own life even when faced with difficult challenges that might tempt her to giving up on her principles.
She is a feminist that I bet a lot of younger women can identify with and I know that she’s connecting to women my age. Hewitt has been taking calls from women ever since McCain introduced her as his choice. He has only been taking calls from women and he’s had a ton of them. The women identify with her as a mom, a mom with a special needs child and as a women. A number of those calling are middle aged. Some are Hillary supporters, some are Republicans who are excited that we finally have a woman running for VP — that this would be making history. She is a step forward for women and we are excited about it. The feminists’ rejection of her is one reason their numbers are shrinking. They should embrace her because she is a symbol of the future of the movement one that’s passing them by.