Navel-gazing commentators in American journalism schools love to lament the dumbing-down of US political culture, but recently they've had no cause for complaint: the focus of debate has been the very nature of reality itself. At a campaign stop last week, Sarah Palin congratulated her audience for living in "the real America", and spoke of her love for "the pro-American areas" of America, a truly mindbending concept that may cause injury if you reflect on it for too long.

Meanwhile, as John McCain watches the once solidly Republican state of Virginia slip out of his grasp, the latest campaign talking-point is that northern Virginia - the Washington suburbs where the Democratic vote is strongest - isn't "real Virginia" at all. Naturally, such distinctions enrage liberals, who resent the idea that not voting Republican equals a lack of patriotism. But the McCain/Palin definition of "reality" caught up with a prominent Republican too this week when Nancy Pfotenhauer, a senior McCain adviser, told a TV interviewer that she herself, Pfotenhauer, lived in a part of Virginia that she didn't consider to be real, whereupon she immediately vanished in a puff of smoke, leaving only an empty studio chair and the faint aroma of absurdity.

Perhaps she's gone to "the celebrity land", another mystical world invoked by Palin this week. "We were on the bus today, we were making a list of who are some celebrity singers who could come out and help us, and gosh, for the life of us, the pickins were slim there!" the Alaska governor told a crowd. "Who's quasi-conservative out there in the celebrity land?" The correct answer to this question is "the actor Robert Duvall and that guy from Metallica". But that's hardly the point: Palin's apparent ability to perceive all these multiple dimensions raises the serious possibility that she is operating from a plane of intelligence so elevated, so completely inaccessible to all but a few of the world's leading superstring theorists, that it wrongly appears to the rest of us very much like immense stupidity.

Contrast Palin's fondness for "the real America" with the disdain for reality demonstrated by the anonymous George Bush aide who famously described the president's critics as belonging to "the reality-based community". ("We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," the source told the journalist Ron Suskind in a now legendary 2004 New York Times article.) Which is more worrying: that the Bush White House believed reality could be ignored, or that Palin thinks her opponents aren't real? Actually, don't answer that.

Making sure people show up at the polls on election day is crucially important work, of course, and one hesitates to mock any well-meaning effort to get out the vote. But can we make an exception for Ben & Jerry's, the ice-cream company whose ostentatious stance of corporate community-mindedness as a marketing tool is almost as annoying as the cutesy names of their flavours? Fresh from getting free publicity from Cherries for Change, their pro-Obama repackaging of Cherry Garcia, the firm has launched a voter-reward campaign offering a free scoop of ice-cream for anyone who can prove they voted on November 4. "Show us your 'I Voted' sticker, a photo of you in front of your polling station, do the I Voted Dance, or just tell us you voted!" the company's website proclaims excitedly. Which would be a marvellous democracy-enhancing wheeze were it not for the fact that offering any kind of recompense for a vote where federal candidates are on the ballot is an offence under US law. "If I were Ben & Jerry's lawyer, I'd tell them to shut this down," writes Rick Hasen, an expert on voting legislation at Loyola law school in Los Angeles, and also, it would appear, a crotchety spoilsport who probably just needs a few more scoops of New York Super Fudge Chunk and a big hug.

Another voter-reward scheme that may be in breach of the law: John McCain's daughter, Meghan, has told New Hampshire voters that if her father wins there she'll have the state motto, Live Free or Die, tattooed on to her body. Not many things are to John McCain's credit at the moment, but one of them is the fact that he's letting his daughter join him on the campaign trail without dictating what she says to the press - a far cry from Chelsea Clinton's message-repeating appearances, let alone Mitt Romney's five sons, who during the primaries ran a strictly on-message and vaguely terrifying weblog, the Five Brothers Blog, in support of their disconcerting father. Meghan McCain, who runs an entirely amiable website at McCainBlogette.com, has called Barack Obama "cute", reported drunken evenings in karaoke bars on the trail, offered candid thoughts on her father's campaign strategies (Mike Huckabee as vice-president, she noted months ago, was "not gonna happen"), and spoken of the perils of dating a supporter of eccentric libertarian superhero Ron Paul: "He collected Barbie dolls. I called my girlfriends after and was like, 'That's weird, right?'"

Turns out that there is a straight-talkin', likable maverick named McCain after all. What a pity they nominated that short-tempered, impetuous, negative-campaigning demagogue instead!

This week Oliver watched Sarah Palin's appearance on Saturday Night Live: "She said almost nothing, so it was a triumph." He also spent far too long reading rightwing American blogs: "You wouldn't believe the things I've heard about Michelle Obama. Which is just as well, because most of them are completely made up."