IF America wakes up on the morning of Wednesday November 5 to discover that John McCain has taken the White House and a moose-shooting former beauty queen from Alaska is now vice-president of the most powerful nation on Earth, there will be only one stronghold of the liberal elite that isn’t reduced to outright mourning.

That will be the New York headquarters of NBC in midtown Manhattan, where a select handful of TV executives will be punching the air, re-examining their share options and celebrating the fact that their employee Tina Fey can carry on as the hottest property in US broadcasting for another four years.

Fey is a comedian, actress, and head writer for NBC’s hit shows Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, who 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.

Clad in thick spectacles and pastel-coloured jackets, and helped by their uncanny physical similarities, Fey and her 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 outwardly-shy 38-year-old is now feted by the Washington press corps for providing a valuable satirical counterpoint to the Republican campaign, successfully 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, in a hilarious send-up aired 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.”

Her sketches, which are now being quoted at dinner parties across the land, might explain why, in the words of USA Today, political commentators now believe that making voters forget the ‘Tina Fey Factor’ provided Sarah Palinis chief challenge in the run-up to Thursday’s vice-presidential debate.

The San Francisco Chronicle said the election could now turn on Palin’s ability to make viewers forget the ‘cultural caricature’, advising her in the debate to “acknowledge Fey’s impression to help deflate its power”. The Washington Post, for its part, 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 just constrained to the political arena, though. In addition to her uncanny ability to satirise a politician who has a propensity to spout gobbledegook, she is currently helping to pioneer an important comic movement. To her fans, Fey is in the vanguard of a generation of sassy female performers who are now setting the agenda in US comedy. Together with her occasional collaborator Sarah Silverman, another edgy and sometimes potty-mouthed star, this makes Fey one of contemporary America’s most alluring feminist heroes.

Her emergence in such lofty realms goes back to the critical and commercial 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 Fey personally. When she stepped up on stage having achieved hat-trick of awards, she provided one of the evening’s most memorable one-liners, saying that the trophy for Outstanding Comedy Series “actually belongs to everyone, so I don’t like it as much as the other two”.

The programme is set in the offices of a television company similar to NBC, and debuted exactly two years ago. It is said to have been inspired 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. Fey plays a neurotic head writer at the network who is constantly forced to sacrifice her artistic credibility to navigate between her hopeless co-writers and right-wing boss, who is played by Alec Baldwin, in a role that has reinvigorated his career.

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 the many Hollywood liberals hoping for a Barack 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 5 November,” she said backstage at the Nokia Theatre after the Emmy Awards. “So if anybody can help me be done playing this lady, that would be good for me.”—The Independent