While Biden issued warnings in Kosovo, Palin wept in a Wal-Mart

You could fill an undergraduate survey course in American history with the political, historical, cultural, and geographical differences between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden and their respective home states. One state is tiny, the other enormous. One state is the oldest, the other the newest. One state leans the deepest shade of blue, the other a still deeper shade of red.

America, as you prepare to watch this fantastically bizarre coupling of contenders on Thursday, I submit to you yet another study in contrasts–and perhaps the most striking yet.

In late-August of 1999 Joe Biden, acting in his capacity as ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was in Kosovo making headlines with a blunt warning to the Kosovo Liberation Army: disarm under the terms of a NATO agreement or lose the support of the U.S. Congress “overnight.” Back at home, he was fighting to keep Bill Clinton’s nuclear test ban treaty.

Sarah Palin was also making headlines in late-August of 1999–with tears in her eyes at a similarly exotic and distant local: the Wasilla Wal-Mart.

The headline from the Anchorage Daily News was “Wal-Mart rings up wedding; working couple walk down retail aisle after tying the knot in Wasilla store.”

Here’s an excerpt from the story:

He worked in the pets department. She was a cashier. A romance blossomed. And when it came time to say “I do,” they chose — where else? — an aisle next to menswear.

Jake McCowen and Rosalyn Ryan exchanged vows last week at the place where they met, work and fell in love: the Wasilla Wal-Mart.

A crowd of 200, including passengers from a tour bus and several dozen curious shoppers, watched the two employees tie the knot in an afternoon ceremony officiated by Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin.

“It was so sweet,” said Palin, who fought back tears during the nuptials. “It was so Wasilla.”

Thursday ought to be interesting. There is no reason a politician couldn’t go from weeping at a Wal-Mart wedding to emerging victorious from a vice presidential debate in the span of nearly a decade. Why not? After all, who knows what she’s learned in her study of foreign policy and other issues of national import over the years. One gets the impression, however, that maybe she’s only just begun…