I'm really tired of political bias sipping into everything I read on topics not related to politics. It's such bad business too. Why would you make a snarky comment risking pissing 50% of your readers off, when you can simply contain yourself and stay on subject instead?
I looked and looked, and my first thought was "He doesn't like Schoolhouse Rock? Schoolhouse Rock isn't political."
Then I noticed this from the start of the article, "Like the small-town mayor who suddenly finds herself running an entire state, our ambitions for Stack Overflow keep growing."
I have a hard time finding that to be anything but a casual and not very detailed analogy. Sarah Palin -> lots of ambition::the SO team -> lots of ambition. How is it snarky? (If anything, he's comparing himself and his team to Palin, so how snarky could it be.)
They also mention running for Vice President of the US, so it's not exactly subtle.
I just don't see the upside to bringing in such a polarizing political figure. Regardless of what you think of Sarah Palin, it hits a sour note to find her in a product pitch.
My focus wasn't really on subtlety (or lack of it). The parent poster was upset about political bias. My point was just that the joke didn't suggest bias to me. Anyone who runs for Vice President is (pretty much by definition) full of ambition; so are the SO people, according to them. That seems to be a pretty limited and simple analogy. I don't see an insult there of any kind, much less political bias. Even more so since the whole point of the analogy was "we have this quality too." I don't see why any of this would "hit a sour note."
Having said that, the two other early responses to your post do suggest that you may be right about how polarizing Sarah Palin is.