Believe it or not, this is actually a subject of debate in some quarters, as Kristof writes in his column today.

I don't think this will have much effect on the election, as anybody who would believe such things wouldn't vote for Obama anyway (although it may be an effective way to get poorly educated people to vote).  However, I do think it touches on three important issues:  The Constitution, Education and Foreign Policy.

The Constitution:  Conservatives take a (not suprisingly) funamentalist view and point to the 10th Amendment, which says that all powers not described go to the states.  However, there is an open-ended "necessary and proper" clause in Section 8.  The truth is that the Consitution was meant to be ambiguous and therefore a subject of ongoing debate.  There were several insoluable problems at the time of writing (i.e.slavery, Indian relations, women's suffrage etc.) that the Founding Fathers recognized would need to be solved later on.  It's unreasonable to suggest that the Constituion was meant as a series of categorical imperatives and any serious study of its formation would debunk such a view. 

The conservative view that the Founding Fathers set in stone the relationship between the Federal and State governaments is an extreme misunderstanding of the debates that formed the Constitution.

Education:  The fact that Palin holds crazy views on teaching Creationism in schools is scary, but even more egregious is the idea that faith should have any role in education.  The whole point of faith is that it requires no evidence, and science is clearly an empirical study.

The idea that school boards should dictate this issue begs the question:  Why stop at biology?  Why not have town councils to decide the fate of Schrodinger's cat?  Or whether to deny the Holocaust?

Clearly the point of education is to supply children with knowledge that is not readily available locally.

Foreign Policy:  It is America's fundamentalist bent that scares the hell out of the rest of the world and makes it that much harder to get our good ideas accepted.  As Gaddis argues in "Surprise, Security and the American Experience," the world will accept American hegemony as long as it's better than the alternative.  Even our allies find it frightening that the most powerful country on earth is run by people that can so self-righteously assert the "right to life" while so steadfastly supporting the death penalty.  For those same people to assert the right of unilateral action whenever their beliefs (even without evidence) call for it is an anathema to most of the world.

Herein lies the crux of the issue facing us this election (and the last one): Is governing a matter of belief or one of serious debate concerning imperical evidence?

John McCain clearly gave his answer to the question when he chose Sarah Palin and it is that, in my opinion, which makes him unfit to serve.