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. On paper, or in a twenty-​second sound­bite, it’s tough to explain why four years in the Senate is so much better than two years twenty months as gov­er­nor, even though it is. (The real answer is that Obama spent those four years prepar­ing, and then con­duct­ing, his run for pres­i­dent, while Palin spent them a/ in Alaska and b/ won­der­ing what the vice pres­i­dent even does.) The media will have its way with Palin soon enough, and it will be suf­fi­cient for Obama’s for­mi­da­ble oppo­si­tion research team to qui­etly feed them mate­r­ial. All Obama and Biden have to do is keep look­ing and acting presidential.

+ For­tu­nately, the “inexperience card” is also now a loser for McCain. And losing that card will cost him more than it will cost Obama.

+ If I’m the Obama cam­paign, I find a way to work the word “responsibility” into every press release and adver­tise­ment I put out. New slogan: “Change we Need, Respon­si­bil­ity We Can Trust.” And though I wish it weren’t so, I’m guess­ing Hur­ri­cane Gustav is going to rein­force the stakes of that mes­sage all next week.

+ On the psy­chodra­matic front, the Palin pick shows McCain at his worst: venge­ful, reck­less, and petulant:

+ The vengeance is not against any one person or group but against the gods of polit­i­cal neces­sity, and it shows in his refusal to take Romney onto the ticket. McCain would have loved to have Tom Ridge or Joe Lieber­man as his veep, but polit­i­cal neces­sity banned both for their pro-​choice views. So McCain picked some­one he barely knew with a resume too thin for anyone to find objectionable.

+ The reck­less­ness is self-​evident, but here’s the National Review’s–yes, the National Review’s–Shan­nen Coffin to drive home the point:

McCain has…made a purely polit­i­cal play with­out regard for the gov­er­nance con­cerns. And how could he really have a good idea of how she would govern? My under­stand­ing is that he only met with her once before choos­ing her.

+ The petu­lance shows in McCain’s deter­mi­na­tion to pick a pretty young woman as his run­ning mate. His beef with Obama’s celebrity was never about polit­i­cal celebrity as such–it was that he, McCain, was no longer the celebrity. And so, more than any­thing, McCain has been dying for a way to take the bloom off Barack’s rose. Upstag­ing him with Palin is the first step. The second step is to try to make Barack look like a dope. (If he can’t do that he’ll settle for dopi­fy­ing his old friend Joe Biden instead.) I’m guess­ing that right about now he’s think­ing he can just sit back and wait for another “sweetie” moment from Obama, or some­thing much worse from Biden, all the while crow­ing glee­fully about his faux-​feminist credentials.

+ Hillary’s job has only just begun. My guess is that she thought–and prob­a­bly with some relief–that she was mostly fin­ished with this elec­tion after the DNC con­ven­tion, having finally con­vinced the media that she har­bored no secret plans to steal away the nom­i­na­tion from Barack. But now Obama’s going to need her out there on the trail work­ing for him day and night. As a friend of mine sug­gested, with any luck, Hillary will see this as a matter of self-​interest, a way to keep Heart­beat Palin from being the first woman president.