Honestly, I kind of hope this is one of those seminal moments when a major party implodes and splits.  If the Republicans lose this election, I don’t think it too much of a stretch to imagine the far right social conservatives splitting from those whose conservatism is more fiscally oriented.

But I definitely believe that it would be a huge mistake for Obama supporters to let their guard down. Every single vote is going to count in this election, especially in the battleground states (like mine).

One of the biggest problems for McCain in this election is that his campaign strategy made it obvious how fake his “Maverick” brand is. I can’t help but wonder if the party might be doing this intentionally to try to help save Palin’s “Maverick” credibility for whatever her next run at higher office is. If the GOP thinks that Palin has a role in it’s future, wouldn’t it make sense to portray her as the rebel who was held back from success by scapegoat McCain’s staff? I’d love this to be a start of nice, long, intraparty conflict—but I’m concerned that it’s just more positioning and branding for 2012 (or whenever).

I actually do think that the reason that Palin has come off as such an idiot is that she was completely mishandled by the McCain campaign, for whatever that’s worth.  She’s got a terrible, terrible education and she’s fundamentally incurious, but she’s not a stupid woman.  I’ve been convinced for some time that she’s got a big future in the Republican Party and I thought they basically tanked her career by putting her into the national spotlight before she was ready. 

However, what concerns me now is that her career has changed trajectory in a basically pretty evil way. She ran Wasilla the way small towns are run.  When she became governor she really did govern as a conservative but a pragmatist.  What worries me is that during the past month or so she’s gotten big responses from the crowd by going vicious, and that the lesson she may have learned is that she can build support by appealing to people’s absolute worst instincts.  Combine that with the popularity she generated for herself in Alaska by giving away big wads of cash and I suspect that it’s not that the GOP wrecked her career, but that they turned her into a latter-day Huey Long.

It may be true that she’s stupidly willful and unwilling to let people who understand politics better tell her what to do, or it may not be true.  Either way, the reason that these aides are leaking these blame-shifting stories is to protect their own reputation.

I hardly think it reflects well on the McCain campaign that not only did they pick an unqualified no-nothing, but they made sure to pick an unqualified no-nothing who’s completely recalcitrant and refuses to take in a cram session, or even hew to a party line. 

This whole “puppet leader” idea only works if the doofus you select is willing to be a puppet.  Duh.

If McCain aides who are brushing off their resumes really think “...and she wouldn’t even do what we told her!” is going to be their free pass to another chance, then wow, there really is such a thing as wingnut welfare.

I think that they’re already trying to establish who really lost the election shows that their assessment of their election-stealing chances is pretty grim.  I wholeheartedly agree that they might still pull it off, and certainly I’m not backing out of my volunteer commitments between now and November 4th.  But the GOP is engaged in a coordinated voter suppression campaign, which means there are some people who are tasked with keeping tabs on the whole thing.  And clearly they aren’t optimistic about their chances.

IMO the most likely scenario is a closer Obama win than it should legitimately be, and some lost opportunities to pick up GOP-held seats.  I can live with that, especially as crazed online activists like us keep flogging the stories about the way the GOP tries to keep Americans from voting.  Last couple of times they stole the election.  This time they won’t, and next time we’ll have even better defenses mounted.

One thing that gives me hope is that we control some key Secretary of State positions that we didn’t in 2004.  Democrat Jennifer Brunner, who replaced Ken Blackwell in Ohio, is just doing a monstrously good job of making sure everybody can vote.  When Republicans don’t control the voting apparatus, it becomes much harder for them to steal votes. 

But yeah, I’m looking forward to the GOP split as much as anybody.  It’s crazy how they look like they’re going from their commanding position after the 2004 elections to total collapse in four years.  Disastrous policy will do that to you.

Furthermore, absolutely nobody wants to go into their last week of campaigning with this being the story.  If you weren’t planning to knife one of your fellow McCain consultants, you are now.  And it’s kind of hard to totally focus on getting votes for McCain if that’s the first thing on your mind. 

If anyone was thinking of giving Obama some last-minute money, please let me counsel donating to some of our lovely House and Senate candidates instead.  At this point, that’s where maximum impact will be had.

The one thing that also makes me happy is that this is true to form for Palin---she has a history of cozying up to the old boys club and then stabbing them in the back.  She probably thinks Jesus wants her to be President, and striking out on her own is the way to do it.

She probably thinks Jesus wants her to be President, and striking out on her own is the way to do it.

Yeah.  I’m still convinced that George W. only ever pretended like he thought Jesus wanted him in the White House.  Whether or not that’s true, we can be sure that Palin really believes it. 

I’d love to be able to ask her if anyone, such as Witchfinder Muthee, prayed over her and claimed the promise that she and McCain would win this election - and what her thinking is on why that didn’t happen.

and what her thinking is on why that didn’t happen.

It’ll be some version of “it’s not the Lord’s time yet” combined with “McCain didn’t have enough faith.” That’s the standard trope--success means god’s blessing and failure means god is testing you.

I’m still convinced that George W. only ever pretended like he thought Jesus wanted him in the White House.

This is pretty easy to verify, considering that Bush is a Methodist.  Which, while there are some rather conservative congregations out there, is hardly along the lines of the Baptist or Evangelical most Americans (religious and non) assume that Bush is. 

He also doesn’t know his bible and once gave a speech hailing the present time as a “Third Great Awakening” for American religious life (the Third Great Awakening actually already happened.  Oops...). 

Not. Religious.

I read the celebration of this same article over at The Great Orange Satan, and the first thing I noticed is that SusanG was remarkably deaf to the mysogynistically-themed nature of the poo being flung.

I think it was fairly clear this spring that the GOP was bound for a massive schism if the party lost the fall election.  When McCain won the nomination, the GOP did what they always do, fall in lockstep.  But if the Old Man couldn’t deliver, it was civil war.

However, a real split implies that a faction is willing to realign itself with the Democratic Party.  It looks as though the Christian Conservative faction would win control of the GOP - which leaves the oligarchs and their aspirants to come over.  Right.  Unless they really think they could pour one of Bloomberg’s billions into the foundation of a real new party.

I predict that a Democratic sweep will, indeed, change the face of politics in the U.S. ... for a while. Then the same-old syndrome will begin and the Democrats, will begin to assume the world has given them the license to do whatever they can conceive of (just like the Republicans), and will slowly become corrupt. As Lord Acton said, power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. When the abuses have become so outrageous, the Republicans (or whatever the party will be called then) will step in and start the cycle all over again. Only problem with this analysis is the lines have become blurred, political names mean nothing any more. Under a “compassionate conservative”, under an initial Republican majority, government grew at its fastest pace, debt skyrocketed to beyond the ozone layer. A Socialist is now a Conservative who has lost money in a financial institution in a personal asset account.

Sarah Palin has been mishandled. Hiding her at first intensified the misgivings of the press / public. Unfortnately, there’s a deeper problem: in the choice of Governor Palin as Senator McCain’s running mate. I’m inclined to agree that Governor Ridge would have been a better choice. Palin is a “loose cannon”, someone whose sense of entitlement begins to rival famous dictators. The name “barracuda” does fit. She has the same “get back at them"spirit that McCain has and that isn’t the way to conduct anything except a war. She also has an unhealthy disregard for Truth. Add to that a mind that has no sense of history or precedents or even current events, and you have an explosive combination. Sarah’s in it for Sarah, and McCain must already be regretting the fact that he often acts irrationally and in great haste when calm logical thought might be a better course.  She does have star power; elsewhere I have compared her to Lina Lamont, silent star in Singin’ In The Rain; she rides over people and seems to possess no curiosity or interest in history of our United States or our government. But, who knows, she may indeed be chosen by the G.O.P., whatever is left of it, for the next election. As McCain has been learning, they may regret that choice if they make it.

To all of the misguided right-wing Republicans and so-called Conservatives, the reason McCain is down in the polls is because he is running a very disorganized campaign without a clear program to clean up the mess George Bush has created.  It’s that simple.  Blaming “voter fraud” and “Powell” and the defections by well-known Conservatives is the wrong way to assess what’s happening.  By any standards, McCain seems to be unable to organize his own campaign; pundits on both sides have been making excuses for him, saying he hasn’t been served well by his advisors, but who the hell is running and in charge of his campaign, if not him?  It’s obvious that McCain shoots from the hip, from the way he had Palin vetted to choosing her, and if you refuse to accept this you’re in deep denial.  Had the Republicans chosen a good smart candidate with good organizational skills, they would probably be ahead now, but no, they didn’t.  But don’t keep making excuses, upon excuses, upon excuses about why it isn’t working and the calamity that will result when Obama becomes elected. 
If you read the recent Rolling Stone piece about John McCain, which pulls together lots of things about him we all knew but never had really connected, you begin to have an understanding of the real McCain.  Oversimplifying it, perhaps, he is first and foremost a military man who always wants to fight to “win”, as is made ever so obvious by his offhand remark that he was going “to whip Obama’s a-s.” Well, “war” and “winning” is not what it’s all about, believe it or not.  Second, McCain wants to be President to cap a career that has been lifelong to achieve a measure of respectability and that he apparently believes is his right.  He abandoned the Navy to succeed in the Senate but a Senator is never fully in charge and can’t easily, believe it or not, tell others what to do.  As a military man, he believes that war is not a place to be clean or honorable or truthful: the important thing is to win.  Yeah, this may sound like psycho-babble but it sure as heck adds up when you look closely. So McCain runs a dirty campaign but won’t own up to it publicly, lest people lose respect for him.  Trying to run a positive campaign seems beyond him because he has never been organized, or someone who can analyze and decide on a course of action except too swiftly and too intuitively, never been someone who leads and inspires a group of workers who support him; in fact, strangely enough, he attaches himself to others who tell him what to do, such as his campaign directors and Phil Gramm, and he follows the Gramms and Keatings of the world.  Just look at how powerless he seems in the face of Palin’s drive and ambition and more of his persona becomes evident.

So, where’s the new American third party?  This is their chance to startup.

However, a real split implies that a faction is willing to realign itself with the Democratic Party.

Very true.  I don’t think we’re looking at a split, or even a long-term realignment of the Republican party.  The oligarchs need the religious nuts’ votes, and the religious nuts’ leaders all want to be oligarchs, so they’ll find their way back to the uneasy truce they’ve had going for a while now.

However, there likely will be a fair amount of time during which they focus more on beating each other up in futile attempts to wrest control of the party than they do on fighting Democrats.  If the Democrats are smart and a little bit courageous - not that I’m holding my breath - we’ll have an opportunity to change this country’s direction and even the false Villager consensus that this is a “center-right” nation.

Amanda is right, this still could be lost.

Whatever you do over the next 10 days add some GOTV volunteering at your local campaign office. We need to win. I plan on spending every night after work making phone calls or knocking on doors or sweeping the floor if that is what they need.

We can do this but it is not over yet!

What worries me is that during the past month or so she’s gotten big responses from the crowd by going vicious, and that the lesson she may have learned is that she can build support by appealing to people’s absolute worst instincts.

Are you kidding?  Palin became mayor by smearing the incumbent.  She accused him of living in sin with his wife and started a whisper smear campaign accusing him of being Jewish.  Palin has always been vicious.

There’s also the matter of her glee in backstabbing others.  She did so to the former governor of Alaska and attacked him for being unethical.  However much of a pragmatist she may be on policy, she is plenty unethical and corrupt herself, abusing her power, filling the Alaskan bureaucracy with her cronies, and bilking the Alaskan government of thousands of dollars.

But she truly does have the Republican brand of denial and delusional thinking down pat.  Independents aren’t voting for McCain because of her.  And she thinks she has a future in national politics?  Yeah right, she’s not stupid.

“So, where’s the new American third party?  This is their chance to startup.”

Sooner or later, the moderate Clinton Democrats will team up with moderate Republicans to form the next opposition to the Democrats. (Perhaps, It will be kind of like the Liberal Party of New York who endorsed Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and Michael Bloomberg).  Either this will be the new Republican Party or it will replace the Republicans as the opposition to the Democrats.

The far right will go the way of George Wallace’s American Independent Party after this election.

A less drastic version of the third party scenario is what happened to the Democrats in 1972.  George McGovern didn’t get the backing of the AFL-CIO.  (This was partly because labor was under very bad leadership at the time, and wanted to take the conservative side of the culture war.) If your coalition is totally dysfunctional and key supporters don’t show up, landslide awaits.

Palin was never a pragmatist. She was always venal, parochial, and ruthless. It just got harder to ignore as she rose closer to her level of incompetence.

Yes, Palin went after Mayor Stein and his beloved wife who died of breast cancer. Palin and her black helicopter buddies actually started demanding to see their marriage license, a tactic that eerily foreshadowed the Obama birth certificate gambit. (Not saying Palin had anything to do with the latter, just a similar sick dynamic.)

Palin also claimed to be the first Christian mayor of Wasilla. Mayor Stein believes she meant first born again mayor, but a lot of people think she was insinuating Stein was Jewish.

I’m glad, Amanda, that you made it clear that Palin’s inauspicious career has been based upon biting the hands that feed her. Stereotypes can be used and misused, and while a lot of the ‘diva’ talk is from people who want to absolve their own blame, I’ll be also thinking that Wasilla am-dram has someone ready to play Lady Maccers this winter.

To add to what OCPatriot said: when McCain said that Obama didn’t know the difference between strategy and tactics, it was pretty revealing. Since picking Palin, McCain has been all tactics. Obama has been, for the most part, about the strategy.

I’ve been in two minds about whether this is the equivalent of 1992 in Britain—where a discredited government clung to power only to be whipped five years later, or 1997, the year of the whipping. I now think it’s 1997, and that 2004 was the 1992 disappointment for the left. It’s harder, with the two-year election cycle, for a party to spend the same amount of time in the absolute wilderness, but I do think the GOP will have plenty of time to deal with being on the shitty end of the stick.

What Amanda said.

I watched the last debate in a union hall with about 500 others.  When McCain made his comment about Palin being a maverick who succeeded by defeating a governor of her own party I said, “Backstabber” in a normal voice.  The room exploded with prolonged laughter. 

Repug operatives know well that Palin’s political success has been achieved by taking down people who mentored and trusted her.  I’m sure Christianists will continue to push her forward as a Star and Great Leader of Tomorrow because she’s shilling for their causes.  After the empty head she revealed under questioning and her obvious pleasure in delivering innuendo, NeoCons and party regs aren’t going to want her anywhere near a live microphone for the rest of her short political life. 

The Alaska investigation was authorized by unanimous vote of the Republicans on the committee and their report unanimously pointed the Guilty finger at her.  The contempt she has now earned from the campaign staff confirms that to know Sarah Palin up close is to hate her hypocritical fundie guts.  I predict an election defeat in 2010 and a CNN show (they’ll continue pursuing the Fox demographic after this election).

Amanda, did you really just say “Democrat Party”?  They’re getting to you. =P Great post, though.

It’s not Sarah Palin’s fault that John McCain was rash and foolish enough to pick her. The pick may well sink the ticket, but if it does, there’s no friggin’ way to deflect the blame from McCain himself. Rumor has it that McCain’s top advisers were as shocked the rest of us when he insisted on SP when the Republican base refused to let him pick his BFF, Joe Lieberman.

He was pandering to the religious right when he picked Palin. When will he learn that he always comes across as a ridiculous asshole when he does that? Like when he supported the Confederate flag as a piece of “heritage” in South Carolina in 2000, or when he embraced Jerry Falwell having previously denounced him as an agent of intolerance, or when he praised John “End of the World” Hagee and crazy Rod “Kill all the Muslims” Parsley, or when he first ruled Rev. Wright off limits and then sort of reversed himself.

When the abuses have become so outrageous, the Republicans (or whatever the party will be called then) will step in and start the cycle all over again.

I fully realize I just may not know my American History well enough; but, when has the Democratic Party made major abuses of power that quality as outrageous?

The WPA? Frankly, I adore the WPA and their works. Social Security? Ditto. THe Civil RIght Act? A proud moment. I am not saying there isn’t anything: I just can’t think of anything.

She probably thinks Jesus wants her to be President

Totally. I’m sure she thought that God’s plan was that McCain choose her, seemingly out of the blue, to be his running mate, they demonize Obama and win, and McCain keels over from cancer bout #5 or a heart attack like Dad (who died at 70, two years younger than JSM III), making Sarah the 45th POTUS.

I fully realize I just may not know my American History well enough; but, when has the Democratic Party made major abuses of power that quality as outrageous?

Just spitballing, but I Woodrow Wilson did some really crappy things while President, especially as concerns civil liberties. And you can look at individual acts of FDR’s tenure, specifically the internment camps, and see their doppelgangers today. But in both cases, you have extenuating circumstances (not as an excuse, mind you) and the depths of Wilson’s and Roosevelt’s venality still didn’t reach to Bush’s.

“Can it be possible that Obama’s run will win not one, but two, of the wishlist items that have been bandied about in the netroots for years: that the DLC faction of the Democrat party and the coalition between old school Republicans and crazy wingnuts will both crumble from internal squabbling? “

My worry, and I’m seeing signs of this at the local level here in Arizona, is that the Big Tent of the Democrats will welcome the country club republicans, and they will merge with the DLCers and corporatist Dems to coopt the party even more .  I’m sitting through far too many speeches and luncheons where Dem Congresscritters and other leaders talk about the need to be more “business friendly” - as if we aren’t enough.  Oh yeah, we need more “free trade” and a “comprehensive immigration plan” that ensures maximum exploitation of economic refugees from countries we’ve decimated with our trade deals, along with wage suppression and the utter political neutering of American workers via the addition of millions more H1b visas, massive outsourcing, and union busting.  I’m listening to far too many Dem insiders welcome this because, hey, it means more big contributions. 

I’m afraid that the populist wing of the Democratic Party, which has the ideas that will really save the country, will be drowned out by this horrible monolith of money and power.  I hope I’m wrong but I fear I’m not.

It’s not Sarah Palin’s fault that John McCain was rash and foolish enough to pick her.

It is her fault that she accepted the offer.

Sorry, Lindsay, but when people who first learned of Sarah Palin’s existence a few months ago insist that she’s this that or the next thing my tendency is to dismiss them.  I’m quite aware of the Stein thing and it’s stupid small-town stuff that you’d run into nearly anywhere (in the very where I live, the town GOP committee put out a flier claiming that the Democrats on the town board, all of whom are Baptists, had the Baptist church parking lot designated a county road so the county would pay to have it paved, which was a flat-out lie).  But as soon as she got into state office she focused on getting that pipeline put through.  She also vetoed the state’s law prohibiting state benefits to same-sex partners on the basis of its likely illegality, and it’s my general sense that most other Republicans would have signed it to keep the Christianists happy.  My concern with her is that although she moved to a more moderate stance when becoming governor, her run for the vice presidency has moved her back further to the right specifically because of the crowd response.  I think she’s being considerably misjudged by the politics-is-a-sport crowd who, as I mentioned, never heard of her before August.

[I know that Google ads help pay the bills but there’s an extremely messed-up one on this page right above this box.  It says “Obama is NOT American” in bright red letters and underlined, and underneath it says in smaller black letters “Do You Agree?  Give Us Your Opinion Now!” Yikes]

If Obama loses, I will riot. Simple as that.

This is going to sound simplistic and it is but it’s also true.  The only thing we can do, aside from what the Obama campaign is already doing in the courts, is vote.  We have to, have to make sure every registered voter gets to the polls and votes.  The only thing we can do is to provide such an overwhelming vote count that it can’t be ignored.  If it’s close, we lose.

Get out the vote.  It’s that simple.

Melinda, you haven’t addressed my argument. You’re claiming that Palin has changed because she has been rewarded for catering to the Republicans’ basest instincts on the national campaign trail. I’m giving you examples of those tendencies throughout Palin’s career.

I’ve interviewed a number of people who have worked closely with Palin in Alaska state politics. My former managing editor, Dave Niewert went to Wasilla for an extended period of time to report on Palin’s early political career. The overwhelming consensus is that her approach to small-town politics was just as hard-edged and divisive as her worst campaign rhetoric today.

Small town politics is basically pragmatic, but to everyone’s amazement, Palin campaigned for mayor of a town of about 6000 inhabitants on a guns, God, and gays platform with a heavy emphasis on anti-abortion politics. This was a particularly gratuitous strategy because the mayor has no say on any of those things. It was pure rabble-rousing. As mayor she tripled Wasilla’s long-term debt by building a poorly conceived monument to herself in the form of a hockey rink but Mayor Pragmatism didn’t bother to check whether the city had clear title to the land. (It didn’t!) The major beneficiary of the deal just happened to be a member of Palin’s far-out bible church.

Then there was the budget she signed off which took away funding for rape kits. She’s lying when she says she doesn’t know. It was a state-wide scandal. The state of Alaska was leaning on Wasilla to change the policy because by charging victims for their own rape kits the city was imperiling the entire state’s funding under the Violence Against Women Act.

Some of her key political allies from her Wasilla days literally answer to names like “Black Helicopter Steve” (straight up fact, not hyperbole). Palin tried to appoint BHS to the town planning commission, but was rebuffed by city council. Like many anti-government loons, town planning is one of BHS’s main bugbears in life. Trying to put him on the planning commission wasn’t pragmatic, except insofar as the Bush administration’s strategy of turning agencies over to people who oppose the core missions of the organizations is a pragmatic strategy.

Palin fired her widely respected public safety commissioner because he wouldn’t fire her ex-brother-in-law. The fact that he fought her ideologically-motivated attempts to cut the public safety budget despite a massive surplus didn’t help either. She replaced him with a compliant non-entity, as per the standard Republican MO.

Palin refused to pick up the phone and call some key conservative House members to reassure them that she wouldn’t veto a bill to correct eligibility requirements for child health insurance for inflation. The bill died because she wouldn’t do it. For less than a million bucks, a simple off-the-record gesture would have resulted in health care for over a thousand working poor kids and pregnant women. This was at a time when Alaska had a $1.3 billion surplus. Everyone from Catholic Charities to Planned Parenthood, to the AARP was on board to fix the program, known as Denali KidCare. Working families were clamoring for it. But Palin refused to act because she was too ideologically wedded to the idea that the government should stay out of health and possibly because her anti-abortion base resented DKC because the program pays for abortions.

Don’t even get me started on the special all-anti-abortion legislative session she was promising before she was whisked off to the campaign trail. She needed a special session because she couldn’t be bothered to spend any time in the state capital.

I’m not saying she did nothing good as governor. I admire her windfall profits tax on the oil companies, for example. But she’s not a pragmatist when it comes to her obsession with social conservatism. Hence, she has a bright future in the post apocalyptic Republican party.

No if she were a diva then gay men would be all over her, but we can’t stand her either.

It may be true that she’s stupidly willful and unwilling to let people who understand politics better tell her what to do,

It doesn’t matter.  She’s repeatedly said Obama pals around with terrorists.  She’s encouraged and dog-whistled the disgusting underbelly of white America to rear it’s ugly head.  It doesn’t really matter if that was on-message or off-message.  Her willingness to pander to that element is enough for me.  Thanks.  But no thanks.

It would be nice for the whackadoodles to form their own racists authoritarian party.  Then the blue dog Dems and fiscal Repubs could form their own party.  The liberal idealists could have their own tent, too.

Racists authoritarian party has a short life term unless the can managed to home-school enough quiverfulls to keep pockets of hatred safe.

“I fully realize I just may not know my American History well enough; but, when has the Democratic Party made major abuses of power that quality as outrageous? “

I’ll add my voice to that of the possibly ignorant of history.  From 1932 to 1968 the Democratic party and its agenda dominated American politics.  Was that a bad time for America?  Was the civil rights act of 1965 evidence of the “corruption of absolute power”? 

Jesus, our agenda rules unabated for 4 decades, and who breaks the cycle?  Nixon, one of the most corrupt presidents ever. 

Old sayings are nice, but they’re no substitute for looking at what’s going on around you.

But Lindsay, if you go back to what she actually did as governor and what made it into the state press, you’ll see very, very little interest in implementing a social conservative agenda.  Indeed, right now if you take a look at the papers in places like Fairbanks and the Kenai you’ll see a lot of surprise at how she’s campaigning and many wishes that the “old” Palin would return because they see her behavior on this campaign as new and unexpected and often don’t like it at all (although there are a lot of Christian extremists in Alaska who prefer the “new” Palin).  This may have been how she ran Wasilla but it’s not how she performed as governor of Alaska.  She adapts extremely well to changing circumstances and contexts, which contributes to her electability.  I continue to believe that the reason she’s performed so badly since the nomination is that the McCain campaign has muzzled her.

I’m not sure that’s either here or there in a practical sense.  I wouldn’t vote for Palin under any circumstance I can think of.  But because I don’t like seeing my candidates misrepresented and caricatured [and the current Google ad is “Obama Fake Money” in red letters] I won’t have any part of doing it to others.  I’ve been following Palin’s career for several years (since she was elected governor) and she’s smart, talented, and a genuine hardass, all of which I think are admirable.  She’s also got a really awful education because she didn’t care enough to get a good one, is fundamentally incurious, doesn’t know crap about national or international issues, is a theocrat and at core a corporatist (the windfall profits tax on oil companies was a cynical gambit to get votes from a population that loves its PFD checks).  There’s a complete person there, much more than the cardboard cutout the soi-disant “progressives” (who I find tend to support policies that echo the ‘90s DLC Democrats) are carrying on about.

Melinda wrote, “[Palin’s] she’s smart, talented, and a genuine hardass, all of which I think are admirable.”

I agree with you completely. Palin is frequently compared to Dick Cheney, but I think the more apt comparison is to George W. himself. Bush and Palin are smart in the same kind of savvy, social, tactical way. They’re both ruthless, vain, petty, overly sensitive to perceived slights, and averse to abstract thought. Palin’s more impressive than Bush because she didn’t have everything handed to her. She got where she is on her own merits, such as they are.

As far as mishandling, the campaign did what they could with the lousy hand they were dealt. Sure, the wardrobe gaffe and the celebrity makeup artist were amateurish mistakes, but those were errors in execution rather than a fundamental mishandling of Palin’s assets as they pertain to the ticket.

I don’t know what they could have done differently. She just wasn’t ready for prime time. When she did go rogue, the base loved it, but she horrified the moderates and energized our base for a backlash.

There is one more point about Palin (and McCain’s win-at-any-cost campaign) that needs to be taken very seriously, and those people who yell “MARXIST” and “BRAIN-DAMAGED” and “uberleftist” do so at their peril. This nation is entering a difficult time, both economically and militarily, and it will be a scary time for some people out there, especially for those who lose homes and savings and jobs. To keep attacking and pumping vicious words at people you disagree with is only fanning the flame of hatred and intolerance. Watch it, because if this nation starts to become more deeply divided, everyone - I repeat, everyone - will suffer. So be civil to your neighbor even if you disagree with him or her, and don’t let that nasty divisive remark go astray. Respect and cooperation, inclusiveness not division, all need to be exercised. Hatred is easy to whip up and hard to calm down in difficult times. Let’s adopt a tone and vision for working together.  We are the United States of America, not the divided states. Let’s keep it that way. I visited Gettysburg and had tears in my eyes because it was Americans killing Americans there, not some foreign war, and I never want to see such a thing happen again.

I buy the George W Bush comparison.  Both ran their states as people who could cross party lines to get work done, and look how that’s worked out with Bush.  I find Palin more appealing on a personal level because I think she’s genuinely tough and genuinely outdoorsy and Bush is afraid of horses and likes to pose for the camera with chainsaws.  He had everything handed to him and still screwed up, and Palin has worked for what she’s got.

You said earlier that local politics tend to be pragmatic and in my experience that’s not necessarily the case (for example, look at all those school districts in which creationists ran for the school board, won, and put creationism back in the schools).  But if you look around the country it seems as if governors do need to be far more practical than one might expect from their backgrounds (hi, Arnold Schwarzenegger) just because of the demands of the job, and in the future we should probably consider governorship to have a moderating effect that would be removed in national office.

As a side note I’ll mention that although I really don’t like a lot of what Sarah Palin has done, nothing she’s said or done that I know of has been as viscerally repulsive to me as GW Bush’s attitude towards capital punishment and his comments to Tucker Carlson about Karla Faye Tucker.  That just strikes me as sociopathic.

Bush and Palin do have certain things in common: While they’re both unintelligent and fundamentally lazy & incurious, they each possess a certain low animal cunning that’s served them well over the years. It’s not quite the same thing as being intelligent, but it’s not exactly stupidity, either...though both “qualities” can exist side by side in some cases. Even out-and-out morons can possess a healthy talent for self-preservation. I’ve known people like that.

In Bush’s case, combined with his silver spoon upbringing, this level of nasty cunning has taken him very far indeed. If he hadn’t been born into American aristocrisy, but had somehow developed into the same sociopathic character he is, I suspect he’d either be dead or in jail right now. (Probably for drug-related offenses.) Palin has worked for what she’s gotten in a way that he never had to, I’ll give her that, but she didn’t do so in a particularly admirable way, now, did she? She’s a born backstabber, a very High School quality that doesn’t look very becoming on a grown adult woman.

More and more, Palin seems to me to be a small-time grifter, a petty chisler who’s done fairly well for herself in a small pond, but is completely out of her depth in the larger political world. it might even be possible to feel some sympathy for her current plight if she weren’t such a nasty piece of work.

If he hadn’t been born into American aristocrisy, but had somehow developed into the same sociopathic character he is, I suspect he’d either be dead or in jail right now. (Probably for drug-related offenses.)

Exactly.

This is a question for folks who think the McCain staff mishandled Palin or squandered her potential: What do you think they should have done differently?

I think things might have gone better for the McCain campaign if they’d let her have a little more freedom and not force her into robot-talking-points mode when dealing with the press.  If you’d seen her at events around Alaska you’d have seen someone who’s natural, relaxed, charismatic, not-batshit, and nothing like the mess who seized up and said “What do you mean by that, Charlie?” I don’t think that they allowed for the fact that she’s a terrible student and ended up trying to squeeze four bushels of corn into a two-bushel basket when they could have done a better job playing to her actual talents, which are considerable.

I do wonder if they’d done a better job handling her she wouldn’t have gone as readily to the nasty rabble-rousing crap.  I’m guessing she probably would have but I don’t know that she would.  It seems possible to me that as their campaign started circling the drain the rallies increasingly drew the die-hards - people who respond enthusiastically to and who tend to believe the crazy stuff - while the moderates, who would have been more likely to respond negatively to it, have been moving towards Obama and not going to McCain events.

...she wouldn’t have gone as readily to the nasty rabble-rousing crap

There have been indications from the McCain camp that, when Palin has gone off message, it’s been entirely about the rabble-rousing nastiness, the palling around with terrorist nonsense, for example.  She also wants to bring up Rev. Wright, which the campaign itself has not wanted to do.

Sure, keshmeshi, but I’m curious about the feedback cycle.  If she put nasty crap out there and the crowd booed or stayed silent, she’d think “that didn’t work” and maybe try again a time or two but if the nasty crap continued to get a negative or stony response she’d stop.  Instead, the crowd responded positively, she noticed that the crowd responded positively, and she kept it up. 

Now, I believe that conservatives tend to be more fearful than liberals and tend to respond more positively to messages that engage that fear, but even so, the disappearance of moderates among McCain supporters tends to remove their, uh, moderating effect. 

[For whatever it’s worth, about 10 days ago I was up in the Tug Hill region of NY state and there was nothing on the radio so I was listening to Rush (so sue me), and when talking about bipartisanship and moderates he said “When you’re talking moderates you’re talking Democrats,” so there you go.]