It's a friendly game of poker — dime limit, dealer's choice — and the dealer says, "OK, it's five-card draw — with deuces wild."

Now, when you pick up your cards, you haven't a clue how good your hand might be. With deuces wild, you could have a full-house, and still have the fourth-best hand at the table.

That's what John McCain did to the presidential poker game by plucking Sarah Palin out of nowhere to run as a kind of blind-date candidate for vice president.

(Voice from the back row: "If you call Alaska nowhere,' Chuckles, you'd better never go there.")

OK, so I meant "nowhere" politically and metaphorically. Alaska isn't really "nowhere," but I'm told that you can actually see "nowhere" from there. (One thing Alaska does have is a hilarious bumper sticker: "Vegetarian — old Indian word for bad hunter.")

Conventional wisdom says that nobody ever votes for vice president, anyway, so what's the difference if Palin, until a week ago, was "Sarah who?" Her selection was clearly so unconventional, so off-the-wall that conventional wisdom no longer seems to apply.

Besides, it's not entirely true that vice-presidential candidates are irrelevant in terms of electing presidents. It's doubtful that John F. Kennedy would have been elected without Lyndon Johnson as his running mate.

That helped get JFK what you might call the Bubba vote — the good-old boys and soccer moms — and if you've been paying attention for any length of time here, you know my theory that no one is elected president without the Bubba vote.

Palin isn't a soccer mom, but a hockey mom — since she does live in Alaska, where there's more ice than grass for much of the year.

Meanwhile, after Johnson's election as vice president, like Harry Truman before him, LBJ suddenly became president. That's why we're hearing so much about Palin being "only a heartbeat away from the presidency" — if McCain is elected.

Palin's choice has intrigued some of us who were having trouble paying attention to presidential politics because 2008 just seemed like a tired, partisan rerun of the usual suspects. McCain and Joe Biden have been around, seemingly forever — and though Barack Obama was new, we've seen and heard him almost every day now for eight months, so he no longer seems new.

In presidential politics, Palin is as new as caribou stew. She even sounded a slightly nonpartisan note in her first appearance with McCain, by alluding to Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton.

For that she got booed by the Republican crowd, showing how absurd partisanship has become. If you say anything considered remotely nice about anyone in the other party — mercy! — those are the bad guys. Go wash your mouth out with laundry detergent.

The Democrats are no less partisan, which is why some of us got so turned off by the whole political scene.

With five children, Palin's husband, Todd — known as "first dude" in Alaska — must be most understanding to allow the family to face the kind of scrutiny that goes with her nomination. So what skeletons are there to be flushed out of the Palin closet?

Remember that Thomas Eagleton was dropped as George McGovern's running mate in 1972, when it became known that he had electric-shock therapy while in psychiatric treatment.

We've had some high-profile politicians who have seemed very much in need of psychiatric care of some kind, and celebrities in show-biz go into rehab almost routinely, but you can't admit any human frailty when you're campaigning for votes.

The first skeleton uncovered in Palin's closet was an unmarried, 17-year-old pregnant daughter. We're told she plans to marry the father, who sounds like a political embarrassment waiting to happen. Already, we're hearing that he has an online blog in which he describes himself as "a (bleepin') redneck" — though that might help in getting the Bubba vote.

Palin knows the value of symbolism by a politician. In Alaska, she sold the governor's jet and drives a hockey-mom pickup truck with a gun rack. The NRA must be thrilled.

(You may recall that when Jerry Brown was governor of California, he refused to ride in the governor's limo and drove an old Plymouth. He also refused to live in the governor's mansion and rented an apartment near the Capitol building. Such symbolism helped him get re-elected, and since term limits didn't apply then, we're told that he's planning to run for governor again.)

Another skeleton in Palin's closet may be the investigation into whether she tried to get a state trooper fired. He was married to Palin's sister, who accused him of domestic violence.

How many more skeletons will be uncloaked in both the McCain-Palin and Obama-Biden camps? Who knows? As the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth proved to John Kerry, with enough money, you can trash anyone.

So far, Palin sounds as though she only feels trashed by "the Washington elite" and "the news media" — a pair of popular targets when she's preaching to the choir, as she was at the Republican convention. Whether or not she resonates as well away from adoring audiences, her choice does add an intriguing wild card to the presidential campaign.

Some of her positions — pro-war, pro-life, pro-gun, pro-drilling — are very difficult for some us to share, but we're hanging loose. We "media" types aren't used to dealing with a woman who — single-handedly — can turn a live moose on the hoof into a freezer full of mooseburgers.

— Chuck Thomas is a Star columnist whose column appears on the Opinion pages each Saturday. His e-mail address is star4cthomas@earthlink.net.