Keep her until late October and then suddenly replace her.

with a hand puppet

On fire.

and on Mars.

You are missing the point of the Palin pick.

Polls do not represent the enthusiasm gap between Obama and McCain. Everyone who tells a phone poller they will vote for Obama will actually vote for him, because he inspires enthusiasm. The same cannot be said of McCain. Republicans tell pollsters they will vote for McCain, but on election day, meh. Before Palin, a significant percentage of voters just would not care enough to make the effort to vote McCain.

So, McCain had to put a social conservative on the ticket to galvanize the base. In that respect, that certainly appears to be the case, so Palin was absolutely the right choice.

I simply refuse to believe that Republican strategists were sincerely hoping to pick up disenchanted Hillary supporters, because that is incredibly sexist and foolish, and not even Republicans are that out of touch.

That leaves the swing voters, who so far appear to be turned off by Palin's lack of qualifications and pile of scandals. With America's slow slide away from the right in the past decade, I personally bet an extreme social conservative wasn't going to attract many swing voters anyway.

tl;dr barring any surprises or significant vote tampering, the election is sort of close, Obama wins, and Palin is forgotten.

"Not even Republicans are that out of touch." Well, yes, actually, they are. It was Karl Rove, believe it or not, that had some of the harshest words over McCain's pick of Palin. And Karl Rove is very, very, very in touch with how his party thinks and how to win elections, as we all know.

I don't buy that at all. Rove criticizes McCain? Rove is an advisor to the McCain campaign. Bashing the pick is obviously calculated.

It's possible, though I don't think probable, that Rove is performing some kind of brilliant double bluff to separate himself from McCain, since he's Bush's top adviser and everybody wants McCain to be two arms' lengths from Bush. Is Rove's importance as a hate word among Democrats more valuable to McCain than unity in the Republican party? I feel that Rove, hard as it is to believe, made a pretty huge mistake.

Rove: "Obviously, Palin is less qualified. Try this: Close your eyes and imagine Sarah Palin sitting at a table with Vladimir Putin. Can you see her? No? OK. Try it with someone else. Close your eyes and imagine her sitting at a table with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Can you see her? No? Me neither. All right, let's try it with Joe Biden now. No problem. We can see him. Palin as President is an impossibility for America...She's not ready."

It could be Jangbones that McCain made his pick and damn the consequences and fuck you all for criticizing him. McCain is a stubborn asshole, and until now that has made him loveable, but I just bet that's what happened here.

I doubt it, too much evidence to the contrary. McCain can be impulsive but he's not stupid. Palin came out of nowhere, McCain didn't know her at all, and that speaks volumes about why he chose her. And its been reported that McCain really wanted Lieberman as VP, and the case for that is actually pretty compelling.

I'm sure some analyses will differ, but even conservative shills like Bill Kristol have conceded that McCain is trailing in this race, and the enthusiasm gap is significant. Since McCain is in trouble, a social conservative with no baggage and a gimmick (and believe me, in Republican circles, her sex is nothing more than a gimmick) is actually the perfect pick for Veep. And if by some miracle he wins this election, he can easily marginalize her like Clinton marginalized Gore and Bush Sr. marginalized Quayle.

Except he kind of screwed up the "no baggage" part.

I could easily see McCain picking Palin after having his heart set on Lieberman and being told "fuck no" by his advisers. It would explain the lack of vetting, the seeming impulsiveness of the choice, and Rove's objections (since he probably wanted someone like Romney.) Rove would also know better than to think that female voters are going to flock to McCain's side just because he picked a woman; McCain would probably think exactly that.

Yeah, that was obviously a pretty sizable blunder. Palin has been a scandal generation machine.

But, really, I think the impact of Palins many scandals is relatively slight. The campaign has had to blame the media to innoculate themselves, and a the resulting small dent in media coverage will definitely hurt McCain, but only a little.

It's also forced the Republicans to sharpen their attack messages, but that was going to happen soon enough anyway.

As far as getting votes, the hardliners will deny or rationalize every story, those who believe the scandals wouldn't have voted for her anyway, and in this particular election, swing voters aren't nearly as important as they have been in the past, simply because there just aren't that many left.

He really should have stuck with either a religious conservative with lots of money or a Republican from a battleground state. This doesn't really make any sense to me, especially given all the stuff coming out about her inadequacies on the job.

Fuck that, I'm still voting Obama.

Yeah. It makes me not proud to be American. But some of them might have some amazing stories to tell. Maybe. Keep the dream alive.

Also, from what I've been reading, she's sloughed off all her parenting duties on her family and friends so that she has the time to advance her personal political career. Sounds like she's a shitty mom, and maybe that's why her bimbo kid got knocked up at 17.

I just got my new voter card today. :)

That Fat Tie-Wearing Man is none other than Republican shill pollster, Frank Lutz. And he doesn't look too happy.

Apoplectic is a better description.

maybe they're just not used to seeing energy after having watched McCain for so long.