Where are They Keeping El Loco?

Is the presidential race now really between Obama and Palin? Am I wrong, or has McCain just sort of disappeared over the last week? And what happened to all the McCain TV attack ads in the DC market? Have they given up on Virginia like they did on Michigan?

I had a chance this morning to read all the newspapers placed before me (WaPo and NYT--I can name them), and was struck by the amount of chatter about Divine Sarah and the absence of much of anything about El Loco. The past week has shown conclusively that the Consumate Maverick can't exercise leadership over his own party any more than the unspeakable Dubya can. Even with both of their support and truckloads of lard, they still couldn't get even a bare majority of Republicans in the House to support the bailout bill. What does that say?

Meanwhile, Palin is all over the place. The weird inversion is that the McCain campaign has gone over big time for the very thing that they blasted Obama for: i.e., using celebrity to sell their candidate. Never mind that much of the publicity is in the form of well-deserved ridicule. Never mind that what Palin says is a bizarre mixture of lies and buzzword-laden gibberish. (Just read the transcript and see if you can find an actual thought there.) Never mind that she has not yet shown that she knows anything about anything. She gets the eyeballs on TV and that's all that matters at this point. Even supposedly veteran pundits like David Broder are talking about how "Palin did just fine" and terming the VP debate "uplifting". Huh???? Ironically, it seems that nearly everyone except TV satirists has abandoned all critical faculties in favor of an American Idol value system.

Palin acts as if she believes she is indeed running for president--which she may well be. Here she is running for commander-in-chief with a resume that consists basically of a six-year term as mayor of a town the size of La Plata, Maryland and being a rookie governor of a state with the population of Baltimore city (in its now-shrunken state). But more important, even in a format that allowed her to regurgitate prepared spoon-fed gobbets of text, she has been unable to articulate a single policy on anything. (Yeah, we know she just loves Israel.) But, as Paris Hilton would say, she's HOT.

I'm not sure if the American public is really buying it, however. With the polls showing solidifying support for Obama, the El Loco's only option is to go for Big Lies and character assassination. The Palin/McCain campaign has already shown that it has no problem with that, so get ready for things to get really ugly for the next month.

Oh, BTW, the Maverick family wants its name back. See here.