I Dreamed I Saw Todd Palin Last Night, Alive as You and Me….

I've been wondering what people are making of the remarkable detail that Sarah Palin and her husband are respectively former and current union members, and that John McCain saw fit to make this a bragging point in his introduction. From McCain's introduction of Palin:

The person I'm about to introduce to you was a union member and is married to a union member and understands the problems, the hopes and the values of working people…

And from Palin's introduction of her husband (which in the delivery really sounded like the part where Pat Sajak reels off a few biographical details about a new Wheel contestant):

Todd is a production operator in the oil fields up on Alaska's North Slope. And he's a proud member of the United Steelworkers union. And he's a world-champion snow machine racer.

Because somebody's always thought of something before you have, Matt Bodie at PrafsBlawg gives it an excogitational rumination:

The real question, in my view, is whether policy will follow rhetoric.  Will McCain-Palin advocate for greater restrictions on trade?  Will they adopt a more restrictive position on immigration policy, or will they drift back towards McCain's more pro-immigration views?  And given that Palin is a former union member, and her husband is a Steelworker, will they support the Employee Free Choice Act?

I'm not sure Palin's own views on any of these matters are that important, given how little Vice Presidents matter in the first place. Nor is this move likely to cause any friction in the storybook marriage of labor leaders and the Democrats (though rank and file union members tend to be less faithful to the party). But it's certainly notable that McCain seems to think of union membership as an advantage here. What are the angles?