McCain campaign aides are running around declaring that the problem with Sarah Palin is that she’s a classic female stereotype—-the diva, (via) the woman who refuses to accept her leash and destroys everyone in her path because of it. As tempting as it is to believe that Sarah Palin’s big mouth is evidence that she’s disobedient, though, I’m thinking the real source of this story is that said aides are putting their applications for their next jobs together and want to make sure that they aren’t held responsible for the enormous error that was adding a barn-storming paranoid racist Bircher to the ticket. 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.
That the McCain campaign is deeply in the recriminations stage is making me feel a highly undesirable emotion: hope. Obama’s way ahead in the polls. The McCain campaign’s behavior shows that their internal polls show them losing, too. I’m wary of feeling hope, because Republicans may not have a ground game in the traditional sense, but they do have a ground game in the voter suppression sense. Using the “create your own scenario” function at Yahoo and assume massive malfeasance, I’m seeing that McCain could easily “win” this, albeit through open fraud. There’s a ton that could go wrong between now and then. If we lose with Obama so far up in the polls, it could cause chaos, but rest assured that the handful of mishandled polls that show the race as somewhat close will be treated like they were the proper measure, and the country will give up hope, because it’s just going to seem too good to be true that someone like Barack Obama could win.