This week-end, I was chatting with a non-political friend of mine about Sarah Palin and she gave me the single most novel take on the vice-presidential choices I've heard so far. Don't get me wrong, I don't agree with this, it was just so out-of-the-box that I had to blog it.

In my friend's opinion, McCain took Palin to get the women's vote and, much more importantly, because having someone who's not ready to be President would make it unlikely that he would be assassinated. The idea was that if there were people planning to assassinate McCain, having Palin as Veep would make it much less likely that they'd go through with it.

On the other hand, she said Obama made a huge mistake because Biden is much more qualified and therefore, assassins would be much more inclined to get rid of Obama in order to put the much more competent Joe Biden in the White House.

When I noted that I didn't believe an assassin would think like that and that I'd never heard anyone suggest that idea before, my friend seemed surprised that it wasn't a commonly discussed theme.