I'm not the only one who sees it

Actually, of course I'm not the only one who sees it -- anybody who has spent fifteen minutes paying attention to any prior Presidential campaign, and who has an IQ at least as high as the summertime setting on your household thermometer, can see the jaw-dropper of a mistake that Obama not only made when Palin's name was announced, but continues to make, as if there's not a single member of that All-Genius Campaign Advisory Team who has any more of a clue than the would-be Next Leader of the Free World and Savior of the Planet.

But Ace lays it out with rather more gusto than I do -- also, of course, being Ace, rather than more profanity. For example:

It's just that... she... is... not... running... for President. But Obama is elevating her to the presidential level. So the race, it seems, consists of two candidates of presidential timber on the Republican side, and one weak, confused jackass on the Democrat side.

And somewhere Joe Biden is talking to an unenthusiastic crowd of three dozen people, half of whom were confused by his constant mentions of "Scranton" and showed up in the erroneous belief that he was Dwight K. Shrute from The Office.

...

But McCain and Palin are just now outright [very creative but very bad neologism] [Obama]. He probably is smart enough to know he's doing all the wrong things, but he just has no idea of what else he can possibly do.

And neither, it seems, does his brain-trust of 300 super-talented scary-smart advisers, who will similarly respond with open-mouthed stupidity if, God forbid, he calls upon them for advice in dealing with Vladimir Putin.

So, voters of America, if Obama becomes President, and Putin or al-Qaeda do something that is both deadly-effective and completely unforeseen by Obama and his team, how will The One respond in that time of crisis?

I'd say we all know the answer to that question now.

I have a good friend who I think is a more or less liberal Democrat, though he may just be somebody who (like me, before Palin showed up) looks at Republican candidates and thinks, "Like I'm gonna vote for that." (Obviously we don't talk politics much.) At any rate, his reaction to the Palin pick was a head-shaking remark about how "scary" was the thought of Palin's having to manage the United States in a crisis situation. Um, well, the thought doesn't really thrill me, actually; which is why I'm glad I'll be voting to make her Vice-President rather than President.

But now you've seen how the Democrats' candidate for the Presidency responds when the heat is on.

Are you scared yet? Because God help you, you should be.

The best attempt I've seen yet to capture what it is about Sarah Palin

Bill Whittle, at National Review, nails it -- at least, this is precisely why I've been walking on air ever since I found out that Palin was McCain's choice. He even has the italics in the right place:

She is so absolutely, remarkably, spectacularly ordinary. I think the magic of Sarah Palin speaks to a belief that so many of us share: the sense that we personally know five people in our immediate circle who would make a better president than the menagerie of candidates the major parties routinely offer. Sarah Palin has erupted from this collective American Dream — the idea that, given nothing but classic American values like hard work, integrity, and tough-minded optimism you can actually do what happens in the movies: become Leader of the Free World, the President of the United States of America. (Or, well, you know, vice president.)

...

A candidate who is young, funny, well-spoken, intelligent, charming, drop-dead gorgeous — and one of ours? Is this actually happening?

Exactly, exactly, exactly, he has word-for-word (literally!) exactly the same reaction I had when the news broke that McCain was going to name Palin as his running mate: "Is this actually happening?" (Okay, I exaggerate: I think my exact words -- which I blurted out loud even though I was alone at the time -- were, "Are you kidding me? Is this really happening? Are you kidding me?" So it wasn't literally word-for-word the same reaction. My apologies for the hyperbole.)

One of the many, many signs that the Obama campaign is as clueless as...sorry, simile fails me...clueless beyond what one would have thought to be the limits of human cluelessness, is this: they have come out, even after that speech, complaining with a straight face and apparent sincerity that Sarah Palin is out of touch with ordinary people. Sarah Palin?!? Sarah Palin is out of touch with ordinary people?!?? Sarah Palin, whose speech and (more importantly) personality and character so moved and exhilarated my non-political farmboy father, who so far as I know has never in his life donated a penny to any political party, and who watched the speech because he was curious about Palin after hearing me say I was excited about her...Sarah Palin, who so moved and exhilarated my father, I say, that he literally couldn't sleep for the rest of that night?!?? (Why bother to sleep if you already feel like you're dreaming?) The Sarahcuda, who is the first candidate in my lifetime to walk onto the national stage and instantly cause an entire nationful of ordinary, hard-working, blue-collar men and women (including undercover-in-Whitecollarville, stealth-redneck operatives like yours truly) to leap to their feet in incredulous delight and say, "Oh my God, I know that woman!!"??? Barack Obama, who has lived his entire life (even his childhood) in the emotional and intellectual sterility of the academic hard Left and in the radical activist movement that sees nothing controversial or unusual in trying to be a Saul-Alinsky-style community organizer, or in hanging out with the Weathermen, or in the Jew-hating, paranoid ravings of Jeremiah Wright -- Barack Obama is in touch with ordinary Americans and Sarah Palin isn't?

It's obvious that even now, Barack Obama has no idea what hit him.

But he bloody well knows he's been hit.

I owe a hat tip on that article to Rachel Lucas (warning: that particular post is okay but if you go spelunking about the rest of her blog, be warned that she rather aggressively has no children and therefore goes to no trouble whatsoever to stay family-friendly). Rachel is also a completely smitten (politically, that is) Sarahcuda fan, and indeed I believe it's Rachel who coined the "Sarahcuda" moniker that (like "Shrub" for Dubya, The Little Bush) is, as soon as you've heard it, the obviously correct tag for the Thrilla from Wasilla. (I was pretty proud of that last one until (a) I saw it someplace else, so apparently it's pretty obvious and there's nothing special about having thought it up, and (b) I saw "Sarahcuda" and knew, "That's the one.")

Rachel, by the way, is into creating her own demotivational posters, and she's having a field day with Palin posters. I presume (since lots of them get e-mailed to her by other people) that they aren't copyrighted, or at least that there's no objection to they were meant to be shared with the wide, wide world, and therefore I happily pass on to you this one, from a post Rachel entitles happily, "Palin makes me want to dance:"



But my favorite so far, I think, is this one:

If Barack Obama actually manages to lose the unlosable campaign, here's what history will say

The moment he lost it -- which is to say, this campaign's version of, "I won't hold my opponent's youth and inexperience against him": Historians won't say that it was when John McCain chose Sarah Palin. They will point to the following words:

"Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency." With those words, Barack Obama, like the Russian sub captain in The Hunt for Red October, torpedoed his own boat by mistake. Whether the damage is fatal remains to be seen; but that it was both unbelievably stupid and devastatingly damaging, is I think beyond question.

A whole post, maybe series of 'em, coming on that one.

The fatal character flaw that doomed him: Vanity. (I think I'll do a whole post on that one, too, someday when I have time.) Not pride; not arrogance. You must remember that vanity, while a vice, has this endearing and pitiable quality that pride and arrogance do not have: it is based on a core of deep insecurity. Obama is not pride or arrogant; he is vain, a proposition I hope at some point to have time to defend with lots of evidence drawn from his behavior over the years. And, tragically, he was put into a position in which vanity was, of all the character flaws he could possibly have suffered from, the one most capable of sinking all his hopes.

The crippling misfortune he was unable to overcome: His utter inability to understand any American who does not come from the extremely provincial far-left academic subculture into which he was born, in which he was raised, and in which he has spent all his life. There is no subculture in America that makes more noise about diversity; but there is no subculture in America whose members are more smugly ignorant of anyone other than their own kind, nor less interested in relating with those others on a level of genuine mutual interest and equality (Obama and his friends can patronize the common man, or they can sneer at him, but they do not understand him and, even worse, have no idea how deeply out of touch they are and how severely limited they are by their own provincial ignorance). The greatest mismatch in this campaign is not the mismatch between McCain's and Obama's experience, vast as that mismatch is, nor between McCain's and Obama's oratorical ability, vast as that mismatch is. It is the Great-Rift-sized gulf between how well McCain and his team understand Obama's team and the swing voter, and how utterly Obama's team fail to understand McCain's team and those same swing voters.

Those words, that flaw, and that misfortune may not be enough to sink even as incompetent a campaigner as Obama in this Year That Should Be Of The Democrats (at this point I'd say it's a pick-'em); but if he does indeed go down to ignomious defeat (and in this year, any Democrat who can't beat a Republican in a national election is deserving of ignomy and permanent retirement from politics), then I believe history will deliver an analysis pretty much along the lines I just laid out briefly here in this post.

A very quick note because I don't have any time, on the competence of Barack Obama's campaign

WHAT THE !@#$!#$!#$! ARE THESE 1#$!#$!#$!ING 1#$!#$!# !@#$!@S OF EXCUSES FOR CAMPAIGN MANAGERS 1#$!#$!#@$!# THINKING THEY'RE DOING???????????????????? HAVE THEY ALL BEEN PAID OFF BY JOHN MCCAIN????? I MEAN, WHAT THE 1#$!##$!ING !#$!#@$!#$# OF A $!#$!#$!#ING !#$!@$!@#$!#$!#$!#@$!@#$!#$!#$!#$!#$!@#$!#$! ARE THEY THINKING????

More details later, probably in three or four days given that this is my weekend with the kids.

But seriously, John McCain handed Barack the Presidency on a sliver platter. A ten-year-old child could have told Barack what to say and the campaign would have been over. Instead Barack has decided to hand the Presidency right back and say, "No, thanks, I don't want it; you take it instead."

Seriously, I cannot BELIEVE what I'm watching. Where the !#$!#$!#$!# did he find these idiots (by which I mean, whoever is giving him the jaw-droppingly abysmal advice he seems to have been taking ever since the Palin pick was announced)? And why the !#$!#$!#$!##$ does a man who thinks he's smart enough to run the country, think putting his campaign in the hands of these advisors was a smart personnel decision? And the most ridiculous thing of all -- he actually is claiming that his best qualification for the Presidency is his management of his campaign for President -- a risible claim even if the campaign were being run well, but off-the-charts moronic when you reflect that it's this campaign that he's talking about.

I mean, WHAT THE #$!#$!#$!@#$!@#$$@%@#$%!#@$$@^@#$@#%?????????!?!

I'm...well, not speechless, exactly. Let's just say bereft of the ability adequately to express myself in a manner that wouldn't get me excommunicated from any self-respecting Baptist church.

Will explain precisely what I'm talking about when I get some time.

I swear, in a year when you would have thought that the Democrats couldn't lose even if they ran a poodle and the Republicans ran Mahatma Ghandi, Barack Obama may very well manage to lose -- thus making history as being, not the first black President, but instead being the most breathtakingly incompetent candidate in the entire history of world democracy.

And I don't think that statement is anywhere near as hyperbolic as it sounds. (In other words, sure, I'm exaggerating, but not as much as you might think. This man is a SERIOUSLY incompetent campaigner, and he is going to come bloody close to managing to lose what I would have bet the farm was an unlosable campaign.)

What I think Palin should go for in her convention speech

I think she should emphasize, heavily, the following three points:

1. She should cast herself as the candidate of proven change -- but she should do so without making a single reference to the historic nature of her candidacy; her mantra should be that she changes things, rather than she merely, by virtue of her genetic makeup, symbolizes change. Obama's constant refrain is, implicitly, that he represents salvation for the country because of who he is; Palin's emphasis should be on change as being what she does. Without drawing explicit comparisons between herself and Obama, she should make it clear that throughout her entire political career, as soon as she shows up, change starts happenin', baby, usually to the mingled astonishment and chagrin and rage of the political powers-that-be. It's easy for any genuinely independent, undecided voter to connect the dots and compare the guy who's really good at talking about change (but whose entire career, when one looks at deeds rather than mere words, is the standard career of the moderately sleazy Chicago-Democratic-machine politician), to the woman who actually has gone in and changed things everywhere she's gone politically.

2. She should cast herself as a candidate of national unity and reconciliation. She should point at her extraordinarily high cross-party approval ratings in the state she has governed for the past two years. She should state openly that while reconciliation does not mean that people who disagree with her political views should feel obliged to vote for her, she still does believe that it is important to identify and respect the admirable qualities and good intentions of people on the other side of the aisle -- and then she should emphasize that her past record (appointing Democracts as well as Republicans, gaining the approval of all kinds of different Alaskans) shows that she understands how to reach out even to those with whom she disagrees. She should say that nothing is gained by accusing other people of bad motives when other explanations (such as simple disagreement on principles) will do just as well, and say that therefore she pledges that nobody who attacks her political opinions and positions need ever fear that she will react by accusing them of sexism. She should end up by saying that there is one group of Alaskans who genuinely, deeply despise her -- and that group is not Democrats. It's the fat cats of the corrupt Republican machine. With everybody else, she gets along fine.

3. She should emphasize John McCain's experience, and how privileged she is to have the opportunity to serve an apprenticeship under him and to learn from all the wisdom he has to offer. (Yes, I know that you guys know that I think McCain is an ass, but I'm telling you what she should say in her campaign speech.) She should emphasize how well she believes that he and she will work together as a team, and of how humbly honored she is to be able to join with him in forging a new identity for the Republican Party, a legacy that he will be able to look on proudly in years to come long after he has retired from active duty (I would use exactly that phrase, as a subtle reminder of his military record), as he and she and the Republican Party rank and file join together to carry out at every level the mindset of reform and of cleaning-up-one's-own-house that she and he have fought for independently in their own respective arenas.

The balancing trick on that third point is simply this: I believe that the core strategy of McCain's team should be -- and I suspect in fact is -- to sucker Barack Obama into campaigning against Sarah Palin. Therefore Palin ought not talk about her own lack of experience explicitly; instead she should talk about McCain's experience and her role as his apprentice, precisely in order to dangle herself as bait in front of the more and more obviously outclassed and amateurish Obama campaign team.

McCain has basically found his party's Barack Obama -- the young, potentially history-making newblood with immense talent and immense charisma and immense resonance in the base and immense crossover potential, but with hopelessly inadequate experience -- and has brought her into the race in precisely the apprenticeship role that would be perfect for Obama. Head-to-head against Obama, Palin wins in an ordinary year, though not in this year in which a poodle ought to be able to win the Presidency as long as it runs on the Democratic ticket. Granted, this year she doesn't beat him -- but she doesn't have to beat him. She just has to (a) energize the base and (b) come across to swing voters as the Republican Obama.

Here's the core thing I think has to be understood about this race; I think McCain understands it and I think the Obama campain hasn't got a clue. The dominant line that McCain is selling to the American people is, "This Obama guy is very impressive; he has a ton of promise; with a few more years of seasoning and experience he could be something really special; but he isn't ready yet, and now is not the time to gamble the leadership of the free world on a pretty but inexperienced new face."

In fact, the core line McCain wants to get across to the American people is simply that Obama may be the right guy, but he's running for the wrong office at the wrong time: he is not yet ready for the Presidency. Isn't it too bad that the Democrats put him at the top of the ticket, instead of running an experienced old hand like Hillary for President and letting the youngster serve as Vice President in order to learn the ropes?

Now as that is the core message that McCain needs to sell, the overriding goal of the McCain campaign should be to get as many voters as possible to subconsciously identify Barack with Palin. Conversely, the overriding goal of the Obama campaign should be to do everything possible to keep voters from associating the two -- and therefore every time Barack campaigns against Palin, rather than McCain, he subtly and unintentionally reinforces the core Republican point that it's Palin's spot, not McCain's, that Barack should be campaigning for.

We've already seen that bear fruit: Barack was asked by Andersen Cooper to compare his experience to Palin's, and what was Barack's answer? "Well, I'm qualified to be President because I've run a successful political campaign." That will no doubt sound convincing to Barack himself; and it will sound convincing to his political advisors and to the effete, elitist political junkies among whom he has lived as his life -- because those people are actually impressed by political campaigning, seeing it (as they do) as an intrinsically valuable activity. But to the blue-collar swing voter in Ohio, that response will prove (I believe) knee-slappingly risible.

What Barack should have said is simply, "I don't think experience in that sense is actually relevant in this race. I think what matters is character and conviction and being on the right side of history..." or whatever. Barack's line should be, "I have no objection to Palin's lack of experience because I don't think experience matters for the Presidency. I'll be a great President, and I have no experience. It's not inexperience that will make her a bad President; it's her medieval views on the right to choice [blah blah blah on to the talking points]."

By nominating Sarah Palin, McCain took the risk of making his "inexperience" argument an irrelevance. But all he was really doing, was giving Obama's campaign a chance to make it irrelevant. If the Obama campaign had instantly welcomed her to the race and said simply, "We don't mind her inexperience," then the race would have ended, right then. But they're too damned stupid to have said that. Instead they instantly screamed like banshees about her inexperience, and then Barack himself, like a lamb to the slaughter, endorsed the importance of experience by trying to argue that he was more experienced...than Palin. Even if he can win that argument, every moment he spends arguing that he's more experienced than Palin (a very debatable point indeed, and I think actually by any rational standard Palin actually has the more relevant experience and certainly the more encouraging track record), he quietly reinforces both of McCain's core assertions: that experience matters (else why would Barack be so desperate to argue that he's adequately experienced?), and that Barack can't even begin to compare with McCain in terms of experience (else why would Barack be spending all his time comparing himself to the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate when he's supposed to be running for President?).

Unbelievable. You'd think a moderately intelligent ten-year-old would have been able to see that trap. But then, of course, that's not relevant, because Barack is not a moderately intelligent ten-year-old; he's a very bright forty-seven-year-old...who has spent the bulk of his life being assured by those around him that he's God's gift to a desperate nation, which is the best recipe I know of for taking a promising young individual and turning him into an adulation-addled fool.

Well, we'll see what line Palin takes in her speech. But I think if she's wise, she'll hammer those three points. Because if the American swing voter comes to see Palin as being more or less the Republican Obama, then the Democrats are, I think, totally and 100% toast. For analogies are, in the end, simple but powerful things, and the analogy the Republican Party wants the American people to draw is:

Palin is to Obama as McCain is to...oops, sorry, the Democrats have nobody in the running against McCain.

Things the Peril would like to hear Sarah Palin say in her convention speech

Actually, it's not that I think she should (from a standpoint of charity or political strategy) say them, just that I think it would be hilarious if she did.

"I think the Democrats should stop worrying about what we're going to do if John McCain dies and Sarah Palin has to run the country, and instead they should start worrying about what they're going to do if Joe Biden dies and Barack Obama has to run the country."

"You know, I said something to John about how one Democrat after another compared Obama to Lincoln. And John told me, 'Sarah, I knew Abraham Lincoln…[pause for laughter and cheers from the cooperative home-team crowd]…and Barack Obama is no Abraham Lincoln. [wait for gleeful roars to die down] By the way, I think it's important to say that I borrowed that line from Lloyd Bentsen -- I wouldn't want Joe Biden to accuse me of plagiarism."

Holy cow, can this be happening?

I didn't vote in 1984 -- I turned 18 a couple of days before the election and didn't meet the deadline for voter registration. I mean, I'm sure there was a way I could have pre-registered or something, but I didn't get around to figuring out how. So my first Presidential vote came in 1988. My choices?

George Bush the elder. Michael Dukakis.

You're kidding me, right?

Maybe things would get better next time around...

George Bush the elder, having spent four years proving that everything I'd feared about the spineless, lying jerk was true. But the alternatives? Bill Clinton. And one of the few demonstrably insane men ever to get a significant number of votes for President, Ross Perot.

Maybe 1996 would be better?

Bill Clinton, Bob Dole. (And Ross Perot, too, though most of the country had finally figured out that Perot had more ears than sanity; so he wasn't nearly as much of a factor.)

2000? Dubya, and Al Gore. We were getting worse instead of better.

In 2004? Dubya, and John Kerry. [sigh of horror]

And it was obvious months ago that 2008 was going to be more of the same: either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, versus John What First Amendment? McCain. Two more choices drawn from the same political elite classes that have misgoverned our country throughout my political adulthood.

I am unduly prone to pessimism and cynicism -- this is something I know about myself -- and so as a corrective I went hunting for some politician -- any politician -- whom I could respect. I actually found two: Sarah Palin of Alaska, and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. Maybe someday, I told myself, I'll have a chance to vote for one of those two people. Didn't talk the possibility all that seriously because the Republican Party is, generally speaking, run by fools; and I'll admit that, what with the stuff that's been going on in my personal life, I haven't paid all that much attention and haven't really done a ton of research, leaving open the possibility that upon closer inspection they too would turn out to be typical politicians, just with slightly better up-front P.R. But still, from what I could see, here were two people who seemed to have a basic attitude toward government that was a lot closer to mine than one would expect a professional politician to have, and who seemed to actually get results. Jindal had his drawbacks (I'm no fan of teaching "intelligent design" in public schools, for example, but then I think the government ought to get out of the education business entirely and no politician is going to propose that). But Palin in particular was purely delightful: the scourge of career politicians in her own party, a free-spirited, blue-collar, down-to-earth lady who clearly had a great deal of personal character and a great deal of personal charm and also the same ruthless stubbornness I remembered in my own grandmother.

So I figured, nah, neither of these two will be get the nod. It'll probably be Romney or Guliani or some other standard-issue politician who has paid his party dues...

And then it was Palin. And to my own astonishment I've been absolutely giddy ever since.

For the past twenty years I've been telling people that for somebody like me, politics is a purely spectator sport, because nobody I would approve of really has much of a chance to survive the party politics that have to be played in order to get the nomination. But I forgot something very important about my Republican friends: the rank and file genuinely hate politics. When professional Democratic politicians play politics, it doesn't appear to bother their supporters much, because if you didn't approve at a fundamental level of politics-as-a-way-to-get-what-you-want, you wouldn't be a Democrat. Nobody becomes a Democrat because they want the government to just leave them alone and stay out of as many aspects of life as possible so that they won't screw up anything more than is absolutely necessary. A Democrat who is represented by a professional politician is a Democrat represented by somebody who shares the fundamental Democratic belief that political action is an intrinsically good thing.

But Republicans? A great big slice of the Republican coalition is made up of people who believe that the government that governs best is the government that governs least -- but they have no option but to be represented by professional politicians. All you have to do is look at how thoroughly and enthusiastically the professional Republican politicians reneged on every promise they made in their Contract With America to see the dilemma limited-government Republicans face.

And so I forgot something critically important. I forgot that there actually are literally millions of Republicans who would look at Sarah Palin's cheerful disembowelment of the Republican party machine in Alaska and think, "Hey, whaddaya know, there's actually a Republican politician out there who really believes what the rest of them tell us just because they know it's what we want to hear." And, too, I forgot that McCain loves to tell himself that he's a Reform Guy, so that McCain is probably the one career politician in either party who would actually place value on Palin's having played whack-the-establishment. I'm used to having a low opinion of Republicans because of the people they keep nominating, and while I had fought off my cynicism enough to recognize that it was possible to find, here and there, a Republican politician who appeared to live out the best aspects of what Republicans tell me they believe, I had not believed that any such Republican could actually find his or her way onto a national Republican ticket.

To my Republican friends: I apologize. In fact, I'm sufficiently grateful to you for nominating Palin that I will do my very best to forget that a bunch of you actually wanted to nominate [shudder of horror] Huckabee. Won't mention it again. If I can help it. Really, will do my best to pretend it never almost happened.

Now, I don't get to vote for Sarah Palin as President in 2008. But that's okay, because I don't think she's ready yet -- although, considering that my other choices are McCain, Obama and Biden, she might already be better than those three lifetime Senators. (The historical record says that if you want a disaster of a President, then by far your best bet is to elect somebody whose only life experience involves the legislature, as life in the legislature inflates the ego of the legislator while being nothing like life in executive office. The two jobs are not remotely similar, but nobody in the world has a bigger ego than a guy who has spent his life in the legislature -- and there's no worse combination than a guy who isn't qualified but think's he's God's gift. The one saving grace at the top of either ticket this year, is that John McCain at least had a life before politics and may possibly have learned something about real leadership before he entered the environment of corporate pathology that is the United States Senate.)

However, I'm looking to the future. If Palin stays in Alaska, then every time her name comes up, the same media commentators who think Obama is the salvation of the nation will complain that Palin doesn't have the right experience. I want Sarah Palin ready to go in 2012, and by far the best place for her to serve her apprenticeship is in the Vice-Presidency. Furthermore, all the talk about the "heartbeat away from the Presidency" is largely irrational since it pays no attention to probabilities, and any decision made without reference to probability-weighted risks and rewards is a foolish decision. The most likely outcome of a McCain/Palin Presidency would be that McCain, with the benefits of modern medicine, serves out his full term in full health. The second most likely outcome is that McCain will serve most of his term before going down. As you move the date of the proverbial heartbeat closer and closer to the present, the odds of its actually happining shrink ever smaller and smaller, until you get to the all but infinitesimal odds that McCain will, like the Harrison of popular myth, give his inauguration speech and then promptly die. (Don't give me Harrison as an example of, "See, it's possible!" by the way; in the age of antibiotics Harrison would have been fine and literally nobody would remember that he got a cold three weeks after his inauguration.)

So the odds are against Palin's succeeding to the Presidency without being elected to it, and even if she does, it's more likely to be late in McCain's term than early.

Now, if Palin runs for office four years from now, after four years as Vice President, will you still say that she is too inexperienced (especially if you are one of the people who has been slobbering in adoration of the Obamessiah)? I won't, at least; I'll consider her ready, and certainly vastly more likely to be a President of whom I approve than is McCain or Biden or Obama, or than was Dubya, or Clinton (either one), or Dole, or Dukakis, or Perot. But what if McCain goes down with six months left to go on his term? Will three and a half years be enough? I would think so, given Palin's proven ability to excel faster than the old pros expect her to. How about two years? Hm...well, I would imagine two years would be enough to make her the best available option. One year? After one year I don't think she'll be ready to be President by the standards I think the country ought to follow -- but by the standards I think the country ought to follow, neither Obama nor Biden would be taken seriously as a candidate, and McCain would be fairly far down on any rational person's list. Personally, I think one year as Vice President would be enough to get the Barracuda past the very low bar that is set at "better than John McCain" (who, let it be said at once, I expect to be a poor President, though not the epochally disastrous President that either Obama or Biden would be).

And if McCain pulls a Harrison and goes down minutes after taking the oath of office?

Well, at least we'll have a candidate who's more prepared than Obama is, and who has accomplished more in two years as governor than Obama's record gives us any reason to think he will accomplish if he stays in the Senate another twenty years. I think Palin's speech on Tuesday night (it is Tuesday night, right?) should include the following words:

"I think the Democrats should stop worrying about what will happen if John McCain dies and Sarah Palin has to run the country, and should instead start figuring out what they're going to do if Joe Biden dies and Barack Obama has to run the country."

I also think, given the Democrats' odd insistence on comparing their candidate of "reconciliation" to the one President in all of American history who was most spectacularly unsuccessful at bringing reconciliation to America (unless by "reconciliation" one means "civil war"), that it would be hilarious to have Palin poke fun at both the age issue and the absurdly over-the-top Obamessiah hype by saying something along these lines:

"I was talking to John yesterday about the Democrats' belief that Obama is the next Abraham Lincoln, and he answered, 'Sarah, I knew Abraham Lincoln, and Barack Obama is no Abraham Lincoln.'" But that one, of course, isn't going to happen. [sigh of cheerful resignation]

Back to seriousness: I think that no matter how this election turns out, I'll suffer under a bad President throughout at least 2009, whether that President is McCain, or Obama, or a post-assassination Biden, or a post-medical-crisis Palin. But McCain is a much better bet than Obama. And every day that McCain's collapse is delayed and Palin accumulates the experience that is, right now, the only thing she seems to me to lack, is a day that gets us closer to what I have long thought was an impossible dream:

The day in which America's President is a President who I think actually is worthy of the office.

So for the first time in my life, my vote in this year's Presidential election is going to be a vote for somebody I believe in (even though it's strictly speaking a vote for Palin in '12), rather than a vote for the guy I think will screw up the country less than my other choice. A week ago I was prepared, reluctantly, to vote for McCain as the least repulsive Democrat running. But, unless I find out something about Palin in the next few months that belies everything I've read and seen in her over the past year, this November I'll walk into the booth and for for Sarah Palin, as the Vice President whom I actually would be delighted to see serving the people in Washington D.C.

It's a bizarre feeling. Never had it before. Kinda like it, though...