Forget the politics. I think this is one of the things that makes Sarah Palin so attractive to so many people of both genders (and paradoxically makes some women respond with instant, visceral dislike or even hatred)--her complete comfort with what all too many see as incompatible characteristics of femininity:
Check out her body language. Here she is, just having finished a political debate in which she was strong, independent, powerful, and went toe-to-toe with an older man with 35 years experience in the game...
...and then she snuggles up to her husband, an obviously happy and confident woman who revels in being "protected," too.
She's the kind of woman who wears a dark, charcoal-colored, business suit to her first nationally-televised debate... with red shoes.
Look at the way her husband looks at her when she's speaking in front of a huge crowd.
Powerful stuff.
P.S. As long as we're on the subject of pictures... Is anybody creeped out (in a political sense) by this picture of Palin, Piper and Biden, taken just moments after Piper met him? If you didn't know better, you'd swear Piper was Biden's grand daughter. The body language--on both sides--is pretty telling (at one point he had both hands on her shoulders for an extended time).