Why McCain Has Lost

A reader writes:

Only hateful people hate Sarah Palin.
She has to be devalued to make your guy not run scared. Bill Clinton was impeached. Please...................

I'll take the "please" to mean that the reader wants more examples of hard-core conservatives who have jumped ship for Obama because of Palin.

Francis Fukuyama, from the American Conservative (emphasis added by me):

McCain’s appeal was always that he could think for himself, but as the campaign has progressed, he has seemed simply erratic and hotheaded. His choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate was highly irresponsible; we have suffered under the current president who entered office without much knowledge of the world and was easily captured by the wrong advisers. McCain’s lurching from Reaganite free- marketer to populist tribune makes one wonder whether he has any underlying principles at all.

George Will, a week after she was picked:

So, Sarah Palin. The man who would be the oldest to embark on a first presidential term has chosen as his possible successor a person of negligible experience.... By his selection of Palin, he got the enthusiasm of the base. But what has he got in Palin? In coming days he and we will learn from a stern teacher, experience.

Kathleen Parker of the National Review:

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself. ... [B]ecause she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true. ... McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. ... She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

David Frum, prominent columnist and former speechwriter for George W. Bush:

I think she has pretty thoroughly — and probably irretrievably — proven that she is not up to the job of being president of the United States.

Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, before he left the magazine founded by his father, The National Review:

My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post:

Palin fatally undermines [McCain's] entire [experience] line of attack. This is through no fault of her own. It is simply a function of her rookie status. The vice president’s only constitutional duty of any significance is to become president at a moment’s notice. Palin is not ready. Nor is Obama. But with Palin, the case against Obama evaporates.

I could go on and on, but why bother? The only ones on Palin's side are Sean Hannity, who with Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly comprise the triumvirate of buffoons who will almost certainly ensure that the Republican Party of the immediate future remains a caricature of serious political thought. Those who vote for McCain in this election did so out of fear, out of denial at how bad things have gotten with the economy and the wars, and out of a sense of misplaced loyalty to a party that has turned their politics into a 21st century Christian crusade. Those who believe in conservatism got sold a bill of goods by Bush and his party, and those who "get" conservative politics recognize in Obama a temperament and sense of cool-headed judgment that are the marks of a conservative thinker.