KEY POINTS:
If America wakes up on November 5 to discover that John McCain has taken the White House and a moose-shooting former beauty queen from Alaska is vice-president of the most powerful nation on Earth, just one stronghold of the liberal elite will not be reduced to outright mourning.
In the New York headquarters of NBC a handful of TV executives will be re-examining their share options and celebrating the fact that employee Tina Fey can carry on as the hottest property in US broadcasting for four more years.
Fey is a comedian, actress, and head writer for NBC's hit shows Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, which won no fewer than three gongs at the recent Emmy Awards.
More pertinently, she is responsible for the hugely funny impersonations of Sarah Palin that have propelled SNL to record ratings, become some of the most-watched video clips on the internet, and driven a fair portion of the agenda of the presidential election race in the process.
Helped by her uncanny physical similarities, Fey's merciless send-ups of the former beauty queen from Wasilla have done more to undermine Palin's campaign for the vice-presidency than the efforts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the entire Democratic Party attack machine combined.
The shy 38-year-old is now feted by the Washington press corps for providing a satirical counterpoint to the Republican campaign, deconstructing such central pivots of their ticket as Palin's claim that Alaska's physical proximity to Russia makes her an expert on international affairs.
"Every morning when Alaskans wake up, they look outside and see if there are any Russians hanging around, and ask them what they are doing there," said Fey's version of Palin a fortnight ago. "And if they can't give a good enough reason, it's our responsibility to say 'Shoo' and get them out of there."
In the words of USA Today, political commentators now believe that making voters forget the "Tina Fey Factor" provided Sarah Palin's chief challenge in the run-up to Friday's vice-presidential debate. The Washington Post noted sternly that some of Palin's recent gaffes have been so significant that Fey has taken to quoting her verbatim.
The Tina Fey phenomenon isn't constrained to just the political arena. To her fans, Fey is in the vanguard of a generation of sassy female performers who are setting the agenda in US comedy.
Her emergence in such lofty realms goes back to the success of 30 Rock, a sitcom she created and stars in, which won four awards at last month's Emmys, of which three went to her.
The programme is set in the offices of a television company similar to NBC. It is said to have been inspired by Fey's real-life experiences behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live, which she joined as a writer in 1997. Its title is a corruption of NBC's head office address, 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
The irony of Fey's recent rise has been that most of her original success came behind, rather than in front of, the camera.
Born in 1970 and brought up in middle-class Pennsylvania, her route into show business came via Second City, a small but well-regarded improvisational theatre in Chicago, where she took evening classes in the early 1990s, after graduating from the University of Virginia with a degree in drama.
"This is where I met all my dearest friends in my life now," she told the Washington Post in 2004. Among those "dearest friends" was Fey's future husband, composer Jeff Richmond, with whom she now has a 3-year-old daughter, Alice.
The couple moved to New York in 1997 so Fey could make her debut as a writer for Saturday Night Live. Within two years, she had been promoted to head writer, the first female to take the role in the show's 33-year history.
The programme's producer, Lorne Michaels, explained her rise by complimenting her ability to "get things done", and saying her jokes were distinguished by "intelligence and attack, an attitude. There's something for you to enjoy after you've finished laughing". Michaels was also a central in persuading her to audition for the presenter's role in the "Weekend Update" segment of the show.
When Fey made her debut in the slot in late 2000, she began to gain a following. Viewers loved her spectacles and her prim demeanour, and became fascinated by the scar on her left cheek - about which she once told the New York Times: "It's a childhood injury that was kind of grim. And it kind of bums my parents out for me to talk about it."
The Washington Post started describing her as an "anchor minx", and gossip magazines dubbed her a TV "hottie".
"There's a group of people who feel Tina can do no wrong in my eyes, " Michaels has said. "But that's because she's just wrong less often than other people."
Now though, Fey has achieved mainstream success, thanks to the growing critical acclaim showered on 30 Rock and universal appeal of her Palin impersonation.
Although it's a job the good people of NBC would no doubt be happy to have her doing for some time, Fey - one of many Hollywood liberals hoping for an Obama victory - has selflessly claimed that she hopes to put an end to the potentially lucrative role.
"I want to be done playing this lady by November 5," she said after the Emmy Awards. "So if anybody can help me be done playing this lady, that would be good for me."
- INDEPENDENT
Watch Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live:
Gov. Palin and Senator Clinton address the nation
Gov. Palin and Katie Couric get real and adorable
