I’m a fall guy for the story line where someone travels back into the past to change something or goes into the future, sees what happens, and comes back to try to prevent it. There are zillions of variations on this theme, currently reflected in such shows as “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”, “Heroes”, and I can think of countless others in books, TV and the movies. They all involve the paradox of what happens when one ends up changing the time line so that he never was able to end up changing the time line in the first place. Maybe that’s the reason why God in Her infinite wisdom chose to make time travel off limits to humankind, a sort of cosmological equivalent of the Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden.

But yet it’s fun, especially for a political/cablenews junkie like me, to speculate on what might happen if the recently concluded Presidential election campaign had been influenced by a bit of carefully-orchestrated time travel. Here’s a peek at an advance copy of the script:

On her way to the checkout counter with her RNC-provided Neiman-Marcus credit card, Sarah Palin suddenly finds herself transported to the fall of 1988, where another unknown Republican candidate for the Vice-Presidency, Dan Quayle, the very junior senator from Indiana, has just been tapped by George Herbert Walker Bush. Quickly adapting to her new chronological surroundings, the Alaska governor senses her opportunity to change the course of history: she slips the young senator a piece of paper with the correct spelling of “potato”.

Unfortunately, her insertion into another time is not quite as surgical as she had anticipated. In the 1988 Vice-Presidential debate, after Quayle recites his famous line comparing his experience with that of John F. Kennedy when he was sworn in as POTUS, his counterpart Lloyd Bentsen looks at him and says: “I was acquainted with Joe Lieberman, and Senator, you’re no Joe Lieberman”. Everyone looks at each other in shock, wondering where from out of the blue that particular name has come from, not knowing that Sarah herself has come out of the blue to fill Bentsen’s head with thoughts of John McCain’s first choice some 20 years in the future.

It all goes downhill from there. Although the Bush/Quayle ticket ultimately still prevails, Dan manages to create huge doubts about his own foreign policy experience when he tells reporters that he can see Russia from his front porch. It wasn’t so much that he doesn’t say “Soviet Union”, though its days are really becoming numbered as the 1990’s approach and Gorbachev wants a book deal badly. It’s more that no one has a clue how Quayle could have such a view from Huntington, Indiana.

Other strange things happen: Wendy’s brings back Clara Peller from 1984 in a new “Where’s the Moose?” commercial. The Wasilla public library receives advance copies of the complete “Harry Potter” series ten years ahead of time, but not too soon for aspiring Wasilla mayoral candidate Sarah to ask how she could go about having it banned or at least modified to include Pentecostal exhortations against witchcraft. Ted Stevens somehow gets tipped off early that he should list his home improvements on his Senate disclosure form, and is handily re-elected in 2008 in addition to saving the expense of trial and appeal.

But the biggest time upheaval has to do with the fact that somewhere along the line during her time travels Sarah manages to infect the late 1980’s with the term “Bridge to Nowhere”. No, not the unmemorable 1986 movie by the same title. Another one that comes out in 1992 in which director Oliver Stone speculates about a future Alaskan governor who actually uses Congressional earmarks to build one in the direction of Siberia because her front porch has been made into another bedroom, cutting off her former view. Both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charlton Heston play in supporting roles. The movie so boosts the future Governator’s image that an amendment to the Constitution is quickly ratified and he is able to run for President in 2012 and NOT let the real Alaskan chief executive anywhere near the spotlight. (Heston’s timeline doesn’t seem to have been altered. As of 2008 he is still wearing an NRA button and clutching an AK-47 in his hands, which seem somewhat less animated than in 1988.)

Back to 2008: After her diversion to 1988, Palin quickly reappears at the Neiman Marcus checkout counter without anyone noticing that she’s been gone for even a microsecond. Katie Couric is waiting outside with microphone in hand. Joe The Plumber hasn’t shown up for his own CBS News interview because Sarah’s 1988 intervention has somehow altered his own career path and he is now being quietly vetted to be Secretary of State in an Obama administration.

What about Hillary? Hillary who?

Don Sherfick's blog | login or register to post comments