Joan,

You hit on something here: Obama has to stop being lawyerly in his responses to simple questions and simply "say it". I recall back in the Saddleback Church event when Rick Warren asked him about abortion, his answer went on "forever". The result is that the listener may have concluded that Obama really did not believe his own answer, seeing that it took 3 minutes to cover all the caveats, preconditions, etc. This is a lawyer trying to parse his words and missing the bigger picture. On the other hand, McCain took 20 seconds to answer the same Rick Warren question and there was not any misunderstanding where he stood.

The Dems are panicking right now because the GOP are connecting on style issues and they have the attention of the entire electorate. Everything McCain and Palin do is magnified 10x which is essentially free advertising and a huge bump in the polls. Even if somebody finds "dirt" in Alaska on Palin, so what? Some silly expense report is not going to affect anything. So drop it. The Dems need to stop whining about the freakin' "bridge to nowhere" because the electorate "discounts" in their minds the small stuff that goes on all the time with elected officals. The Dems dug up a DUI charge on GWB 4 days before the 2000 election and what did that do? Nothing. Simply because it was heavily discounted by voters because it happened 25 years earlier.

Hey Juan,

Keep producing pieces like this and Obama will call you and not so kindly tell you to shut up.

THis is the kind of stupidity that jacks up McCain's numbers.

The vitriol on this thread is at a level I have not seen in a while...maybe last seen a few months back when HRC was competitive. What is it about female candidates that bring out the vile in people? Too much estrogen in this thread.

Hey Cintra:

Go read Paglia's piece and calm down. It's hypersensitive feminists like you who draw unneeded attention to Palin and build her into something she really isn't.

You are making Joe Biden's job more difficult if you keep morphing this woman into something that she clearly is not.

BTW is Joe Biden still running?

You are not the only uberfeminist whose head is spinning today. Your world is upside down because you have been blind-sided by this woman. You assumed incorrectly that there was only one way for women to achieve their goals and that is thru strident feminism and this woman is not only far exceeding her personal goals, she is doing so without saluting you and your sorry crowd. More important than you, Obama has not been his usual self since Denver and now would dearly love to be able to trade Biden for Hillary. I don't have to go there any further other than to say that when Biden meets Palin, the audience watching will exceed 100M and the Western world will stop for 90 minutes. There will be enormous pressure on Biden to nail this woman once and for all, so you can go back to being normal, whatever that might be.

Significantly, this woman will dance around the hard questions and when pressed, she will jump into her stump speech, and will simply "run the clock out". She isn't stupid. She knows she can't really match Biden word for word so he will be unable to deliver the knockout punch. Meanwhile, she gets free advertising for 90 minutes to strut her stuff and her LOOKS and the rest will be history.

Dear Joan,

Did you approve that dreadful piece by Cintra Wilson? I hope your excuse is that you were tied up on MSNBC and it won't happen again. As editor, you really don't have to publish every piece of garbage that crosses your desk (or screen). As you know, stupid pieces like that end up in the wrong hands and paint an unsavory picture of Obama values in places like southern Ohio, Oakland County MI, Orlando, FL, etc. Now, what part of this don't you understand?

Palin should not have missed that one although the question may have been designed to trip her up in the sense that Gibson could have just as easily asked her position on "preemptive war" or "just war theory", but to lead in with "Bush Doctrine" is a little wonky.

what is Obama going to do about the Palen-effect? It's one thing for Salon to beat the drum on Palen, but nothing will happen practically speaking unless Obama himself calls Palen out on the competence factor. Obama needs to explicitly make this an issue so he is on the record that Palen is a nice person, but she is also an idiot and doesn't belong in the big leagues. But everybody is so #^&%$ hesitant to put this on the record for fear of some imaginary backlash from folks who won't vote for you anyway.

This is how the Dems routinely lose presidential elections, the GOP knows it full well, but the Dems never learn.