Gov. Sarah Palin's time in the white hot center of American politics isn't exactly the fairy tale her earliest supporters imagined during the heady days of the Republican convention.

Remember when she was marketed as a card-carrying member of the lumpen proletariat -- only hotter?

In the mythology that accompanied her rise from obscurity, the Alaska governor was portrayed as someone who, despite her political success, hovered only half a notch above her working-class constituents. She was real.

Ms. Palin may have come straight out of Wasilla, but she was the closest thing the Republicans had to Cinderella. Like that fairy tale princess-to-be, Ms. Palin traded her steel-toed boots for glass slippers and a charge card to Neiman Marcus.

And what a sense of style America's self-proclaimed "pit bull with lipstick" displayed when she hit the national stage, having arrived in a horse-drawn carriage full of lies about "bridges to nowhere" and jets sold on eBay.

While dancing with his young protege, the aging Prince McCain realized she was a whole lot hotter than her image as the second coming of "Roseanne."

John McCain's courtesans outfitted Ms. Palin and her family in expensive clothes to enhance her authenticity with working people.

Jon Stewart joked on "The Daily Show" this week that the Palins rolled the Republican National Committee like a "family of grifters."

"I know how they're doing it," Mr. Stewart said as a picture of Ms. Palin hovered on the screen. "The 'Hot One' finds an elderly victim, or a mark if you will. Then she seduces him with her unfancy talk. And once he pulls out his checkbook, here comes the relatives. The old [man] never had a chance."

But the fairy tale actually began deflating shortly after the dance began. Cinder-Palin and her aging Prince McCain valiantly attempted to ignore the castle falling down around their heads.

Even as their polls sank, they extolled the virtues of small-town America while excoriating other people's patriotism by accusing them of "palling around with terrorists."

Only the truest of true believers refused to see Cinder-Palin's once gleaming, horse-drawn carriage for what it truly was -- a dead moose with a couple rounds emptied into its rotting skull.

There's no point in belaboring the analogy. The clock struck midnight a long time ago for McCain-Palin.

In 12 days, the governor will likely have to return the $150,000 wardrobe the RNC lavished on her and her family for the sake of appearances. The GOP has finally run out of fairy dust. No point in being bitter about it.

Last week, Lewis Lapham, the longtime editor of Harper's Magazine and founder of Lapham's Quarterly, delivered the first distinguished lecture of Point Park University's newly inaugurated Global Cultural Studies program.

Mr. Lapham had a full house for a lecture that ran the gamut from the collapse of confidence in capitalism to the shortsighted stupidity of America's ruling class.

Point Park University's Global Studies majors kept Mr. Lapham on his toes with penetrating questions during the Q&A.

The interdisciplinary program that seeks to develop critical analysis of contemporary social inequalities is the brainchild of Channa Newman, professor of French and Cultural Studies at the School of Arts and Sciences. The lectures will be open to the public.

"That was one of the things I insisted on," Ms. Newman said, adding that Point Park University is committed to enriching and expanding the city's cultural and intellectual life.

Fans of Mr. Lapham's erudite and politically contrarian essays in Harper's can imagine what fun he had commenting on our various political follies during this election season. "The mainstream media is too subservient to the corporate oligarchy," he said. It was hard not to take his criticism personally.