…has my vote for the most fatu­ous phrase of this polit­i­cal cycle.

It strikes me that in the last 48 hours the notion of a commander-in-chief test has gained new rel­e­vance. May I sug­gest this one?

Holy shit, what did I just do? (Photo by Jim Wilson.)

 
+ First thought: John McCain better hope that he doesn’t get so much as a snif­fle between now and Novem­ber 4.

+ Second thought, echo­ing Rick Perl­stein: don’t laugh. Yes, Palin’s a hail mary. Yes, McCain is des­per­ate. Yes, the haste and appar­ent rash­ness of his deci­sion prob­a­bly means that his VP vet­ting left a few skele­tons lurk­ing in their clos­ets. And yes, the Repub­li­cans are prob­a­bly going to wake up next Friday with a huge Palin-​sized hang­over. But this is Amer­ica, folks, and cra­zier things have hap­pened. What’s more, the Palin pick has evan­gel­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tives–most of ‘em, anyway–burn­ing up the inter­nets, and remem­ber that they’re the Repub­li­cans (not the civil lib­er­tar­i­ans or the busi­ness wing of the GOP) who staffed Karl Rove’s phone banks in 2000 and 2004. If McCain could some­how recap­ture that orga­ni­za­tional energy (though it’s almost cer­tainly too late) Obama might be in trouble.

+ The “inexperience card” is a loser for Obama.

Dennis Kucinich, on the Repub­li­cans, in a line the Obama cam­paign struck from his DNC con­ven­tion speech:

They’re asking for another four years–in a just world, they’d get 10 to 20.