Bailout Bombs

I can now report that one of the questions deals with Supreme Court decisions, and that the Alaska governor was unable to name a single ruling other than Roe.

Two days until the great VP debate, the media consensus is that the Alaska governor has a problem.

"Gov. Sarah Palin has lost control of her public image, several top-level McCain advisers said this weekend, and even a baseline performance in Thursday's debate with Joe Biden may be too late to recover it," says Atlantic's Marc Ambinder.

"The decision to sequester Palin from the national political press corps was made with the assumption that the afterglow from her convention speech would last; a month later, even some Republicans are beginning to have a less favorable opinion of her. Her knowledge of policy has seemed at times no more than inch deep, and even admirers have complained that her penchant for returning to talking points sounds artificial. Several times the campaign has had to clean up her remarks for her, such as on Saturday, when she hinted at a view of U.S.-Pakistani relations that was closer to Barack Obama's. Aides questioned why CBS's Katie Couric was given a second interview with Palin after Palin's responses were ridiculed."

Even Mitt Romney says the sequestering strategy ain't working:

"Holding Sarah Palin to just three interviews and microscopically focusing on each interview I think has been a mistake. I think they'd be a lot wiser to let Sarah Palin be Sarah Palin. Let her talk to the media, let her talk to people."

At Right Wing Nuthouse, Rick Moran dismisses Bill Kristol and others who say Palin should simply be liberated:

"I see where a few of my friends on the right are calling for the McCain campaign to 'unleash' Palin and just let her be herself. This is delusional bordering on willful self deception. With Palin, what you see is what you get. There is no hidden genius. There is no glib, down to earth Will Rogers-like cornpone philosopher just waiting to be freed from the McCain campaign's efforts to prep her for the media.

"The Sarah Palin we have seen in interviews -- minus the deliberate cutting and pasting done by the CBS partisans -- is the Palin we got: Unsure of herself, light on facts, and clearly (at the present) over her head on the national political stage . . .

"No one believes McCain chose her because she was qualified to become president 'from day one.' Few are. She was a political choice as all Vice Presidential selections are. But this idea that there is a hidden Sarah Palin just waiting to be 'unleashed' is kooky. She isn't going to suddenly start speaking in complete sentences or stop repeating herself, or give anything save a thumbnail's sketch of understanding when it comes to the issues."

Um -- you really didn't have to do any cutting and pasting to make Palin look bad when she's talking about Putin coming into Alaskan air space.

It didn't have to be thus, says National Review's Byron York: