Clinton, especially campaigning in a state in which she’s the underdog, subtly seems to be arguing, “You may like Obama, but if you vote for me, you can get Obama anyway — he’ll be on my ticket.” Indeed, a month ago, longtime Clinton apparatchik Lanny Davis and Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe floated the same idea, rather explicitly. If you like Clinton and Obama, the argument went, the only way to get them both is to vote for Clinton (because she’s more likely to tap him as a running mate than the other way around).

But there’s also the broader context to all of this, which makes Clinton’s comments rather … confusing.

Just over the past four days, Clinton has publicly suggested that John McCain’s experience is preferable to Obama’s, and McCain meets the “Commander in Chief threshold” that Obama does not. They were, at least to me, some of the most disappointing attacks Clinton has made in this entire campaign process.

And yet, interspersed with these criticisms, Clinton is also publicly raising the notion that she’d strongly consider Obama for her ticket. Isn’t there a disconnect here?

What the show grasps is that private corporate and public institutional managers both employ “quality” in an Orwellian register in which a “quality process” is one of continuously increasing workload and continuously eroding salary and benefits, with a single, doltish mantra employed everywhere — in police departments, in social services, and school systems, just as on college campuses: the perpetual command to “Do More With Less.”

As Time magazine television critic James Poniewozik observes, what this actually means “is doing less with less and cutting corners to make it look like more.” Hence the need for assessment instruments that everyone inside an organization understands to be trivial and easily spun to nearly any purpose by agile institutional actors.

Yet, for every step forward, say many comics and cultural observers, when it comes to being funny, women still face many societal prejudices. Nice girls just don't act like that, says comedy veteran Rusty Warren, who recalls male audience members storming out of her shows. Not much has changed today, say observers who suggest that many people, men and women, find attractive, aggressively funny women like Sarah Silverman threatening.

Witness the recent column in Vanity Fair which declared "Women Aren't Funny" (written by Christopher Hitchens). And despite the fact that his ABC comedy employed numerous funny women, comic Drew Carey says the prejudices are real. It's not so much that women aren't funny, he explains, as that men don't want them to be funny. "Comedy is about aggression and confrontation and power," says the stand-up comic. "As a culture we just don't allow women to do all that stuff."

Just four years ago, when unprecedented turnout by born-again "values voters" was credited with ensuring George W. Bush's re-election, the political face of evangelicalism was Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, screeching red-faced to football-sized crowds about gay marriage as "the Waterloo," "Gettysburg" and a force that "will destroy the earth."

Now the Moral Majority generation of Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly, the folks who fired up politically apathetic born-again Christians in the 1970s by declaring war on public schools, abortion rights, gay rights and "liberalism," has lost its grip on the movement--partly by refusing to expand their agendas to suit a rising generation of younger evangelicals who care more about global warming than winning elections for corporate Republicans, more about combating poverty than denouncing homosexuality. With one-quarter of Americans identifying themselves as evangelicals--about 4 percent more than those who say they're mainline Protestants--the political stakes could hardly be higher. But the political upshot could hardly be murkier.