First Dude

hammerlock: I don't think your trained chimp comment is too off-base. When Palin was first announced I started researching her and the way I perceived the dots connecting is that her so called "energy" experience (basically being pro oil and drilling), made her a useful replacement for Bush as a pawn for big oil interests - lack of intelligence included.

Schadenfreude is fun, and Sarah Palin is a reprehensible person. Right now I'm more interested in the GOP attempts to claim that Obama does not have a mandate.

Like clockwork, David Brooks is pushing that line in his NYT column today. And Newsweek ran the story saying that we are a "center right" nation - though if you read the article, by "center right" the author really just meant we are not socialist in the (old) European model.

BTW the next time you're moved to complain about the fluff/issue ratio in TradMed reporting, note the ratio of comments here vs Joe Klein's post about Obama changing the tone of negotiations in Iraq, just by being nominated. Steve Benen at Washington Monthly notes the same effect.

ArtPepper:
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I go on about bobo's column at some length, Here.
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FWIW.

Politicians are the same species as regular humans. I bet the Palins were just plain old disliked. Some things are uncomplicated: in a losing cause, likeable people inspire great loyalty and the unlikeable get thrown under the bus. Remember, she wasn't even allowed to give a concession speech. It seems like a lot of people that worked with Sarah Palin really hated her. No one is immune to that, and it's relevant not trivial. Sure, the anonymous campaign sources are loathsome - but it is meaningful that Palin exits the campaign with tomatoes being thrown at her from behind. Leaders inspire confidence and loyalty, not derision.

WVNG -- on a more serious note. If memory serves me correctly. This is usually the time when winning campaigns get as much if not more attention about how they put it all together and I'm not seeing that. All I see so far is the McCain saga and what damage has been done to him by the secret devious diva known as Sarah the barracuda. By the end of this thing its not going to be about the lack of vetting or McCain's misjudgment but about how his operatives, former Bushies all, served him poorly and how Sarah sneaked on to the campaign plane and sabotaged the race so she could run in 2012. And McCain will soon come to be known as Charlie Krauthammer put it this morning, "the most worthy presidential nominee ever to be denied the prize."

Yawn. Another tidbit from spineless (and, of course, nameless) McCain operatives, trying to blame the loss on Palin. Pathetic.

I find it more interesting that so-called journalists just blare out anything these bitter and small people leak, without a comment. Tools.

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Dee in Columbia MD: Is it possible that it is in their best interest to find a scapegoat because they don't want to admit they got beat by the black guy?
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That would be the easy explanation, and fitting in a few cases. The more complex explanation is that the convincing Democratic victory on Tuesday demonstrates that much of the agenda and ideas the right wing has been pushing (free market theory, social conservatism, etc.) for the couple of decades is deeply flawed. The right-wingers - the true ones, not the opportunists like Palin - have so convinced themselves of the superiority of their viewpoint that they are having a hard time facing up to the reality that they aren't as correct and popular as they thought they were...
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Which, considering that they are right-wingers, is no great suprise. What we're witnessing is the right-wingers going through something like the Five Stages of Grief. They'll come out of it eventually.

I don't buy into the current Pity Palin meme. Sarah Palin drew incredibly sharp and aggressive distinctions about the "good people" that are grown in "small towns" and "real America" versus "the elite" who "don't see America as we do." She RAN on the superiority of her and her tribe's morality. Time to close the loop on that morality before packing it up for 2012.

Dee-
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A lot of republican staff types sat this one out. The ones who didn't are going to have the L affixed to their foreheads, and will be finished. Democrats go back to losing strategists over and over again. Republicans, not so much.
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(Note that Obama did not employ the usual suspects in his campaign.)

Yes Jay and Art--
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It seems to all be a part of a multifaceted attempt to take attention away from the decisive winner in this contest. Add to that the immediate rejection of his initial decision on chief of staff -- as if bi-partisanship means do it the GOP way. I think what the GOP plan is to say while we didn't win let's make it about us anyway. They are going with he didn't really beat us we beat ourselves so therefore the public really wants us. And then lets follow that up with since Obama is a lefty and he knows we are a center right country when he said change he meant moving toward our way of doing things.

The thing is, every indictment of Palin is an indictment of McCain's judgment and qualifications, too.
So they oughta be careful about throwing her under the bus, 'cuz they're handcuffed to her.

There are certainly conservative forces that don't want Palin as the New Face of the GOP. They couldn't stand the ridicule at those co-mingling DC and NYC cocktail parties.

Of course, there are some that realize what an unmitigated disaster her ilk has been for our country, not just their party.

It's the Barney Fife strategy-- "Gotta nip it! Nip it in the bud!".

jay
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RE: fluff thread commments
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I think sometimes its not an apples to apples comparison to say that fluff gets more attention than something substantial. I personally read Joe Klein's post and didnt really come up with anything substantial to add on to the post or to ask about because I think we will basically have to wait and see how everything works out AFTER Obama is sworn in. We could speculate but personally I don't know if anybody has the answers to what motivated Ahmadenijhad to send that letter to Obama. I have been back a couple of times just to see if any trolls showed up with their usual "Obamas going to allow Iran to destroy Israel" memes but other than that I didnt feel like I had much to offer that conversation. This post is definitely fluff but I also know that it divides us up on different sides of the coin. I had a strong feeling Dee would show up on this thread because she is almost VIOLENTLY opposed to anybody criticizing Sarah Palin being a shop a holic (Dee I remember your admiration of her red jacket ) I also knew some people would think the leakers were full of sh!t and others would think Sarah Palin is full of sh!t. And I would much rather debate something light hearted like this than ultra serious stuff like we all have been commenting on leading up to the election. Right now I would take all the fluff I can get!!! But in 3 years I will be back to wanting substance. Thats just my take on it.

I get what everybody is saying and I'm sure that there are a lot of complex reasons why people react to what they do. but I've seen a lot of losing campaigns and it is more typical to call out bad strategy than bad actors. But in this case its not just the other side. Even Democrats and msm types seem to be pinning this victory on the outside, beyond the control of the candidate events rather than the superiority of the Obama campaign. Oh yeah they mention it every now and then but in every story the turning point is September 15th when the economy collapsed. It's like the collapse triggered a default switch to Obama rather than his victory was the result of a superior strategic vision that positioned him to be able to take advantage of the economic down turn. -- no it was all a happy accident the luck of the Irish. yeah right.

Dee,
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They use the financial crisis in the same manner. They want to make it seem that Obama could do no wrong and they could do no right after the crisis hit and therefore Obama shouldn't get much credit. But as I said yesterday, if on Sept 15 McCain could have said he was deferring to his VP choice Mitt Romney who helped to save the olympics to come up with a plan to lead the country out of this financial crisis we very well would all be here commiserating today instead of celebrating. That they won't admit that publically shows that they are either really that clueless or that they don't want anyone to believe that the black man had a better strategy and made better decisions than they did.

It's fascinating watching "small c" conservatives like Andrew Sullivan battle it out with the right-wing Republican party apparatchiks like William Kristol. The fascinating part is that the are both entirely delusional, and that delusion is what fuels their debate.

Sullivan equates good government with small government, and that is true to the extent that the government shouldn't over regulate people's personal lives. But he is delusional if he thinks that small government with a limited role in regulating the market is the answer to everything. To his credit he realizes that the instrument of conservative beliefs, the US Republican Party, is completely corrupt.

Kristol and the rest of the neo-cons are simply delusional. They don't give a crap about the Country or the people who live in it. To them we are simply lab rats to be subjected to their crazy political theories.

What's pathetic is that there are still tens of millions of people who voted for the massively corrupt and intellectually bankrupt Republican Party because they honestly believe that the Republican theories of supply-side economics, hyper-aggressive militarism, and government-mandated social behavior will actually help them or anyone else.

This is not to say that the Democratic Party is flawless. In fact the opposite is true. The Democratic Party is barely less corrupt than the Republicans. But at least their intellectual has been proven correct and ahead of the curve for decades.

Nearly every single issue that those "crazy hippie liberals" have advocated have been proven correct, eventually. Working backwards the "liberals" have been right about the Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan, global warming, banking deregulation, investment in cops on the street and soft military power, regulation of carbon-producing energy, the establishment and increase of CAFE standards, Medicare, the civil rights amendment, and the economic practices and policies that were put in place after the Great Depression to help build a social safety net: Social Security, TVA, and the public works projects that built the dams in the West.

And every time these policies were put in place you had the Republican Party and conservatives there to retard our society and our country.

When I read right wing columnists and bloggers I realize that PT Barnum was right, there IS a sucker born every minute. Happily the majority of the American people decided to ignore fools like Kristol, Limbaugh, and Lieberman this time.

Let's hope the good thinking continues for a few years so we can make progress before the Republicans begin their campaign to start fooling people again.

Most MSM outlets did not touch Palin's relationship to a secessionist group. Now we learn that at least Fox was hiding more very damaging information on the VP candidate. Why were facts hidden?

Don't bogart the spray tanner, Todd.

Dee has a great point. When you hear McCain's loss being blamed on the economic crisis, you'll note that no one ever refers to HIS HANDLING OF SAID CRISIS. Its all about some outside force that McCain couldn't over come. But why couldn't he?
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Maybe if he'd embraced a meaningful change (like, hmmm, not proposing ANOTHER BIG CAPITOL GAINS CUT) to deal with the crisis, and hadn't looked like a particularly old chicken with his head cut off, he could have prevailed. He could have opposed the bailout substantively and come up with a better policy. He could have reacted more appropriately in the beginning instead of instinctively defending President Bush by chiming in that the "fundamentals are strong." He could have passed over his transparently stupid "campaign suspension" gimmick. He could have looked calm, cool, rational and understanding- like President-Elect Obama.
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John McCain lost this election because his opponent was far smarter, quicker, more thoughtful, a better strategist, calmer, and demonstrably more presidential. Barack Obama WON. John McCain LOST. And as others have noted, anyone who wants to pin this on Palin needs to go back to the corrupt dope who picked her in the first place: John Sydney McCain III.
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The George W Bush of his storied family.

Politics is the manipulation of symbols. Palin was all symbol. It is substantive and not fluff to defuse the power of Palin the symbol and not leave it out in some field to explode in the electorate's face at a later date. There are millions of Americans who throw their allegiance to people who are "one of them" and "have a good heart." Showing Sarah Palin's true colors is part of a process to lift that veil from people's eyes and make inroads into self-destructive tribal voting patterns.

Dee has a great point. When you hear McCain's loss being blamed on the economic crisis, you'll note that no one ever refers to HIS HANDLING OF SAID CRISIS. Its all about some outside force that McCain couldn't over come. But why couldn't he?
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Maybe if he'd embraced a meaningful change (like, hmmm, not proposing ANOTHER BIG CAPITOL GAINS CUT) to deal with the crisis, and hadn't looked like a particularly old chicken with his head cut off, he could have prevailed. He could have opposed the bailout substantively and come up with a better policy. He could have reacted more appropriately in the beginning instead of instinctively defending President Bush by chiming in that the "fundamentals are strong." He could have p@$$ed over his transparently stupid "campaign suspension" gimmick. He could have looked calm, cool, rational and understanding- like President-Elect Obama.
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John McCain lost this election because his opponent was far smarter, quicker, more thoughtful, a better strategist, calmer, and demonstrably more presidential. Barack Obama WON. John McCain LOST. And as others have noted, anyone who wants to pin this on Palin needs to go back to the corrupt dope who picked her in the first place: John Sydney McCain III.
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The George W Bush of his storied family.

I was informed this morning via conference call that I have been "down-sized." This is NOT the sort of thing you want to read at a time like this.
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"Redistributing the wealth," indeed! For shame.

Spray on tanners are so new money.

Sorry to hear about that, Friar Tuck.