Politics' Dirty Diaper needs to be changed.

"In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change." –Sarah Palin (RNC VP Nomination Acceptance Speech)

Both campaigns are running on change. That poses a question: If both parties are going to be a NEW and DIFFERENT type of leadership, what’s in office now?

So instead of change, we’ll call it reform.

“[The] McCain-Palin plan is to reform Republicanism by keeping Republicans in control of the White House and most of the powerful posts in the federal government. That’ll show them.”

Gail Collins, in an Op-Ed column for the NY Times, highlights one of the biggest criticisms of the Republican platform: you can toss “change” into a speech in ever other sentence, but words don’t mean action. McCain has voted with Bush 90% of the time. On the other hand, Palin put the Alaskan governor’s private jet on Ebay.

Reform.

But notably, Palin significantly changed Alaska’s “excess” spending and its financial state as governor. She crossed party lines to reform Alaskan politics.

And since both parties are calling for bipartisanship, reform shouldn’t be left within individual parties, but throughout Washington, too. Dirty campaigning? Let’s take the old ways of negative ads, personal attacks, and direct jabs and reform them, too.

"Victory in Iraq is finally in sight; he wants to forfeit."

“Al-Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America; he's worried that someone won't read them their rights.”

"Government is too big; he wants to grow it."

Maybe party lines will be harder to cross than we thought. Last week, Palin put on her lipstick, took off her gloves, and is ready to knock some teeth out. Preferably polar bear teeth.