Of all the dumb statements made about the recent presidential election, the absolute dumbest has to be the assertion that Sarah Palin cost John McCain the election.

Not only is there no evidence to support that conclusion, but the truth appears to be precisely the opposite: that McCain got more votes with Palin on the ticket than he would have received had he chosen someone else as his running mate.

Yes, I know, I know. There’s the small matter of that CNN exit poll in which 60 percent of the respondents did not think Palin was qualified to be President. But what those who cite that statistic don’t tell you is that, in the same poll, of the 60 percent of voters who said McCain’s choice of Palin was a factor in their decision, 56 percent voted for the McCain-Palin ticket, while only 43 percent voted for Obama-Biden. Read more »

Sarah Palin just won’t go away.

The election is now two weeks behind us, and the news media can’t seem to get enough of her. Last week she was interviewed in her Wasilla kitchen by Fox’s Greta van Susteren (while making moose chili), and by NBC’s Matt Lauer (while making a halibut-and-salmon casserole). CNN’s Larry King also interviewed her, but it was by remote hookup, so he didn’t get to sample the governor’s home cooking. Maybe he can drop by the next time he’s in Wasilla.

Gov. Palin clearly was the star of last week’s Republican Governors Association meeting in Miami. In fact she turned this normally dull conclave into a major media event that rivaled the doings of President-elect Obama’s transition team in Washington. And early this week the news media were reporting stories of a purported $11 million book deal for the Alaska governor. Read more »

Much of the elite conservative punditry, those well-bred and well-paid right-wing columnists who write for the upscale opinion journals and the opinion pages of the “big” newspapers, have been having a field day this election season reminding us of the alleged shortcomings of Gov. Sarah Palin.

George Will is only the latest of the breed to join in this gleeful piling-on. On Thursday, in a column in The Washington Post (” Call Him John the Careless“), Will chastised Sen. McCain for his “carelessness” in choosing Palin as his running mate:

Did McCain, who seems to think that Palin’s never having attended a “Georgetown cocktail party ” is sufficient qualification for the vice presidency, lift an eyebrow when she said that vice presidents “are in charge of the United States Senate “? She may have been tailoring her narrative to her audience of third-graders, who do not know that vice presidents have no constitutional function in the Senate other than to cast tie-breaking votes.

Well. Read more »