There has been so much fact-stretching and insufficient fact-checking accompanying the latest developments in the dramatic saga of the US presidential elections, that some confusion is inevitable. Maybe it is worth re-establishing the basics here, such as the fact that the president of the United States and the people in key federal leadership positions for the last eight years are members of the Republican Party. If you’ve only tuned into US politics lately, you may have gotten that wrong, for the incumbent candidate, John McCain often sounds like a speaker at a Barack Obama (his Democratic opponent) rally these days.

“I promise you, if you’re sick and tired of the way Washington operates, you only need to be patient for a couple of more months,” McCain told supporters in O’Fallon, Missouri, on Sunday, August 31. “Change is coming!” A natural continuation of the advertisement McCain ran last month declaring, “We’re worse off than we were four years ago.”

And then there was defeated Republican presidential nomination contender Mitt Romney sealing the convention’s Reform Day with a striking non-sequitur: “We need change all right! Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.”  Huh?

In his acceptance speech, McCain continued harping on the change theme. “Let me just offer an advance warning to the old, big-spending, do-nothing, me-first-country-second crowd: Change is coming,” McCain said.

Somehow in the process of dismissing Obama’s talk of change as pseudo-messianic empty babble the Republicans must have gotten an epiphany.

Intuitively, it makes more sense to run as the opposition party if you are indeed the party in opposition. And in a working democracy, the way you typically reform a party is by putting it out of a power until they learn better. The concept of reforming Republicanism by keeping Republicans in control makes me skeptical. But hey, I’m all for change in the ways of Washington, and if it happens “from the inside” I’d still take it.

But how? Enter the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who is all about reform. In some ways the sudden rise of her star is a testament to McCain’s desire to distance himself from president Bush (he didn’t even mention his name in his acceptance speech) and mastermind Karl Rove. In an article in the Huffington Post, Sidney Blumenthal, former assistant and senior adviser to President Clinton who writes a column for The Guardian of London and Salon, says that McCain's selection of Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska reflected his impulse to reject Bush. Unfortunately, “impulse” may be a key word here. McCain really wanted to name the rather centrist Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate, but that option was a political impossibility that would have provoked an open revolt at the convention. Karl Rove tried to twist McCain’s arm into choosing Mitt Romney. Resentful of Rove's maneuvering, McCain outflanked him with Palin.

Hmm. A folksy, seemingly harmless outsider with solid evangelical credentials, big-money connections and outsize ambitions. Did McCain crash right into Rove’s embrace while trying to run away from him? Sounds like a package that Karl Rove would actually love; after all it offers the ingredients he needs to re-cook the Bush success he concocted.

In her superbly delivered and greatly received speech at the convention, the Republican Party’s symbol and agent of change, proved that in at least one way she’s different from Bush (pitbull in lipstick apart) – she can speak! But Palin also made some more substantial claims about her résumé as a reformer, which even her hometown paper, the Anchorage Daily News, called a “stretch.”

"I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending [...] and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress,” Palin said. “I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."

As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to secure more than $27 million in federal earmarks for the town with only 6 700 residents. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation, although she has cut, by more than half, the amount the state sought from Washington this year. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to Gravina Island, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a "bridge to nowhere." She was an advocate for the project before that.

So how many times have you heard McCain promise to slash taxes and pay for it by eliminating unnecessary programmes? And who better to help carry out that agenda than the governor of a state whose residents pay less taxes than anyplace else in the union due to their genius in making the federal government pay the tab for virtually everything?

Maybe at least her credentials as someone spearheading ethics reform will check out, though while she’s under investigation in her home state for the abuse of power in trying to get a state trooper (and a man involved in custody battle with her sister) fired the jury’s out on that one, too.

If Sarah Palin’s best example of being a reformer was trying to sell the over-the-top governor’s plane on eBay, while commendable and innovative, it is not my definition of big-time reform in the world’s major power.