Dealing with one's parents' troglodyte political views can be an exasperating business. But this campaign, perhaps because of its endlessness or because of its increasingly high stakes — the economy melting down or the prospect of Sarah Palin a heart beat away from the presidency — may have made many families more than ordinarily testy about the race.

"I get enough spam as it is, without having to weed through additional emails from family members to determine whether or not they are worth my time. The jokes and cute kittens emails are OK, but please discontinue the forwarding of political and religious emails," my brother wrote my mother earlier this year, precipitating several rounds of back-and-forth recrimination in our family.

To me, Sarah Silverman's comical notion of convincing Jewish relatives in Florida to vote for Barack Obama through familial threats and intimidation, hints at a darker problem: what if yours won't come around? What if you find yourself having to decide: my politics or my family? And having to conclude that these people who I've mostly cherished are cretins?

My mom, for instance, likes Palin much more than she likes me. Palin turns out, in fact, to be my mom's soulmate. She's dreamy over her: "She's fresh like a daisy." She's an articulation of my mom's dreams and ambitions: "I see her as a role model for my daughters."

My mother is a Republican-committee-woman type who recently moved from Buckhead in Atlanta to a gated community called Big Canoe an hour from the city in the north Georgia mountains. If she had political opinions beyond some traditional Republican bromides as well as the irksome articles and emails she forwards, I'd long ago become inured to them. To me it was just mom-ish background noise. Whatever my mother's politics, we comported ourselves like any more or less liberal (certainly for the south we were liberal), upwardly mobile family — an emphasis on culture betterment, Ivy League schools and, ultimately, an apartment for me in the East Village in Manhattan.

I never suspected this might not be what my mother wanted for her daughter. But Palin seems now to suggest on her part some sort of reverse snobbery — an attack on the way I was raised by the woman who raised me. Maybe that was the point: her over identification with Palin is a way to punish her children for not taking her politics seriously (or for not even listening). Which, indeed, was suddenly another sore point: my mother is truly taken with Palin's horrifying family.

"If I had gotten pregnant at 17," I demanded, "would you have made me get married?"

"We don't know that Sarah Palin made her daughter get married. Though I am glad if she did."

"Huh? Hello? You were a member of Planned Parenthood!"

Be calm. I tried the patient daughter approach (or the impatient daughter trying to act patiently): "OK Mother, but on the issue of Palin's intelligence and experience ... ."

"Sweetheart, I would like you to get past taste," said my mom in what seemed suddenly to me like the eerily placid voice of a cult member, "and judge people for what they stand for and how they feel about things. Reject Palin for her views, but not who she is."

We broke down shortly. "Mother, the decision you have to make is between Sarah Palin and me — you can't have it both ways. You can't love her and love me. We negate each other. The point of my life is not to be Sarah Palin."

Fury. Apoplexy. Embarrassment. Still, my family.

"Is your mother a complete moron?" Asked my New York boyfriend as a I tried to describe my frustrating and confounding conversations. Family pride briefly won out over political sense, rousing me suddenly to attack the boyfriend and defend my moronic mother.

A few weeks after Palin's nomination, I was forwarded an article about why New York-sort of people necessarily oppose Palin (which I forwarded to my mother — why not?). This condescending view spurred another effort on my part of trying to see this as an issue of the elites in places like New York versus my salt-of-the-earth parents in their gated community.

Families exist, after all, in complicated contexts. If my life had become different from my parent's life, that did not mean that we had to turn on each other, that we could not somehow understand each other. Right?

Nuts. That's the thing with Palin. There just isn't any real way to rationalise her — or to think well of the people who might, or even to quite comprehend the people who might. The fact of her sudden existence is crazy. If the rise of George Bush toyed with good sense, Palin stomps it. She's beyond logic. She may be as bizarre and loopy a political development as any in our time. It's all the more bizarre for the fact that vast numbers of people get the joke — it's there in primetime. Palin is the national joke. She can't be taken seriously — and she isn't. She defines the purest, most stubborn, most brazen, knuckledheadness in America. And even more infuriatingly, it's an empowering knuckledheadness (which is exactly the problem with knuckleheadedness).

"I believe," said my mom in one of our recent conversations, growing testier by the moment, her in the flush of her Sarah excitement, "I should be president".

"You? Mother, you?"

"I have as good a brain as any up there," said my mom. "Our nation was not founded by professional politicians."

Calm down, breathe regularly. There was, possibly, some good news here. My mother seemed to be disregarding the relative awe with which she has always held Republicans in Congress. Palin might be a kind of acknowledgement of how badly the Bush years had turned out. Palin is, after all, a kind of rejection of politicians — that's what her having, practically speaking, no experience in government was about. Anyone can do it better than it has been done. You can't expect diehard Republicans to admit their own failure and obsolescence. So a Palin figure is just the agent of this understanding. She's hyperbole. Insisting on this ridiculous figure could be my mom's way of helping the Bush years end. Maybe.

But then there is another sort of conclusion. Our own politics emerge from our families during stubborn, implacable, contrary conversations. In a family debate there is no hope for a fitting riposte, no standard of logical argument, no need of a factual basis. Just an absolute determination to insist, to not give in, to fight to the bitter end. Win or lose. The craziness here is deep. That's what explains Sarah Palin: my mom must be angry with me.