Has Palin’s Star Dimmed?

When I wrote about Palin shortly after McCain chose her, I said she did not have enough time to gain fan loyalty in order to have a significant positive effect on McCain’s votes. I think I was right on that, despite her obviously having gotten a big bump in popularity, simply by being a novel sort of candidate. I wouldn’t be surprised, after seeing her disastrous interview with Katie Couric on CBS news, if she in fact does what was bruited about during the Republican convention, namely resign from the candidacy. Maybe McCain could now pick Lieberman.

But McCain has said he is suspending campaigning, ostensibly because of the looming financial mess. He has not said that he will restart his campaign,and perhaps he won’t. This may turn out to become one of the oddest elections in US history, a candidate essentially giving up.

In the Couric interview, Plain did not come across as someone one can easily align one’s mind or emotions with, since she bordered on incoherence of a depth far beyond the worst George W. Bush ever offered, and she looked continually scared, while pretending to be confident, not a winning combination, nor one that it is easy to identify with. I think few people will be won over to her, rather than seeing her as more of an object than a person.

McCain cannot have failed to note that Palin is a disastrous candidate, how cannot keep his campaign afloat. (He would have not gotten much bounce in the polls at all, had he not chosen this unconventional candidate, so he was counting on her for a lot. Barring a disastrous mistake by Obama, McCain probably knows he now cannot win. His choice is get rid of Palin and take a gamble on Lieberman, or just forget the whole thing. I suspect he will find losing badly to be highly humiliating, so he might take the former course, though the precedent (McGovern’s dropping Eagleton in ‘72) is not hopeful for him.

If it does happen, you read it here first. And, by the way, McCain might do really badly in debate himself.