Forty years ago, Richard Nixon reached into the State House in Annapolis and plucked maybe the least known candidate for vice president in all of American history before somebody named Sarah Palin showed up the other day.

Nixon’s guy was Spiro Agnew, who was known far and wide across America as Spiro Who? Agnew had been governor of Maryland for about a year. Sarah Palin’s been governor of Alaska for about a year and a half. Before he was governor, Agnew was Baltimore County executive for one term. The suburbs were exploding back then. Before she was governor, Palin was mayor of the town of Wasilla, Alaska, population 8,500. That’s slightly more than Frostburg, and slightly less than Bel Air.