As it turns out, polls showed that Palin started out elevating the ticket, but she quickly became a drag on it as all the stuff surfaced that McCain should have discovered in the vetting process.

Did you actually look at the polls?  The number one incident was the couric interview.  Did you look at when that happened and looked at the polls before and after?  Was he on his way down before this interview?  Yes.  Was there something else going on in the country at the time?  Any thing ring a bell?

Quote

As it turns out, polls showed that Palin started out elevating the ticket, but she quickly became a drag on it as all the stuff surfaced that McCain should have discovered in the vetting process.

Did you actually look at the polls?  The number one incident was the couric interview.  Did you look at when that happened and looked at the polls before and after?  Was he on his way down before this interview?  Yes.  Was there something else going on in the country at the time?  Any thing ring a bell?

I did follow the polls, and Palin's slide began with the Gibson interview.  The Couric interview was much worse because of that.  And it wasn't just the polls that made her such a liability.  It was the constant trickle of criticism from Republicans who just couldn't see her getting next to the presidency.  Then, as time went on, there was the patently obvious fact that McCain wouldn't let her solo in any more interviews.  Finally, in the end, you had the spectacle of her "going rogue", the clothing scandal, and the public endorsements by Republicans such as Powell, many of whom mentioned Palin as figuring in their choice.

Now I'm not saying that Palin was the only reason that McCain lost.  I'm saying that she became a significant liability for him.  He also contributed to his own demise with his fake cancellation of his campaign to "fix" the mess in Washington.  He bloodied his own nose with his histrionics and his (and her) relentlessly negative campaign. 

But don't despair.  Palin is coming back.  If convicted felon Ted Stevens should win his election, chances are good that she will run for his senate seat.  And, given the voting patterns of Alaskans, she may very well win it to carry on his legacy.  She will never appeal to more than a fairly small demographic, but she has joined Limbaugh and Hannity as a right wing celebrity.  Her future is practically assured.  Unless, of course, Begich should squeak by Stevens.  Then she'll actually have to govern Alaska in a time of shrinking budgets.  That won't be pleasant, but it might actually force her to learn how hard it is for other governors--the ones who don't have oil surpluses whose wealth can be redistributed via taxes to the voting public.  What a hypocrite she has been.

i guess the US situation is more complicated than in the UK - we had a law legalising abortion passed in the late '60s (i think) by Parliament - that is, by our elected representatives.  That would satisfy you, yes?  Oddly, our unelected representatives, the House of Lords, have recently been responsible for shooting down some very unpleasant legislation that the government had managed to force through parliament by bullying and bribery.  Extending the period of detention without trial, for example.  Anyway, i guess we don't have this 'judicial activism' thing, or actually a constitution for certain people to say that they have the correct interpretation of, and which others must therefore abide by.

Problably what seperates the US's situation from the UK's is that for the US, laws that effect the citizenry are being passed by not following the established system that let's them decide, while by your description it seems government can easily use the established system to pass such laws without the public. That probably says something about the two respectively.

EB, you should try to learn more about what a representative democracy is all about.

Oh I'm well aware of what a representitive democracy is all about. I wonder if you do, as the fact of the matter is judges aren't elected by the people nor is it their job to represent the people. And there are in fact many cases where those individuals who have been elected to represent have done a poor job, as evidence by my own state's governor voting in support of an issue that 80% of the population was against.

And stop worrying about politicians circumventing the established system.  Once Obama takes power, he'll begin restoring some integrity to the rule of law.

How ironic then that he has shown such blatant disrespect to a very basic and small requirement for presidential elligibility by not being more open to the cirumstances surrounding his birth and citizenry. Not that I expect facts and actions on record to change an Obama fanboi's mind.

Copernicus --

I do not see McCain's actions as reckless but as calculated risks.  Finishing a respectable second in the Presidential contest gains him nothing, and I think he probably saw that the only possible way to win was to be bold.  Being bold is risky and can backfire.  The selection of Palin is perhaps the classic example of this.  She was a wild card with the potential to be a game-changer if she performed brilliantly.  She wasn't as quick a study as he hoped but some things just cannot be known for certain ahead of time.  Suspending his campaign was another example.  Perhaps that was too much of a gamble, but he must have known the economy tanking would be bad news for him. 

I think that you are trying hard to see McCain in the most charitable light.  He is beyond any doubt a man of tremendous courage and loyalty to his country, but that is no reason to wear blinders when it comes to his eccentric behavior.  He is someone who loves to take chances--a lover of gambling and pretty women--and his selection of Palin was really his first chance to show us how he would make decisions as president.  And that was the problem. 

Obama took a very different approach, and his tight discipline and careful management of his campaign stood in stark contrast to McCain's seat-of-the-pants style.  McCain took the low road--which you euphemistically termed "bold" and "risky"--because he had no other option.  He simply had no real program to offer the country.  The thing is that Hillary Clinton did the same thing and failed.  And, in the end, it was the worst kind of thing to do for the country, and he knew it.  He had pledged not to go in for mudslinging and nasty politics, but he did it anyway.  And he got what he deserved for it.

Read this article on Salon.com.  I've never heard of this lady and I'm not a fan of Salon, but in the main, I enjoyed this article.  Including this part (but the whole thing was good):

In the closing weeks of the election, however, I became increasingly disturbed by the mainstream media's avoidance of forthright dealing with several controversies that had been dogging Obama -- even as every flimsy rumor about Sarah Palin was being trumpeted as if it were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai. For example, I had thought for many months that the flap over Obama's birth certificate was a tempest in a teapot. But simple questions about the certificate were never resolved to my satisfaction. Thanks to their own blathering, fanatical overkill, of course, the right-wing challenges to the birth certificate never gained traction.

But Obama could have ended the entire matter months ago by publicly requesting Hawaii to issue a fresh, long-form, stamped certificate and inviting a few high-profile reporters in to examine the document and photograph it. (The campaign did make the "short-form" certificate available to Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.) And why has Obama not made his university records or thesis work widely available? The passivity of the press toward Bush administration propaganda about weapons of mass destruction led the nation into the costly blunder of the Iraq war. We don't need another presidency that finds it all too easy to rely on evasion or stonewalling. I deeply admire Obama, but as a voter I don't like feeling gamed or played.

The election is over, sntjohnny.  Deal with it. 

"i understood that he showed it (or rather, that a member of his campaign showed it) to a reporter.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/01/AR2008050103224.html"

That doesn't mean he didn't also show it to a judge.  I read that he did.  I'm not going to hunt it down but if I come across it again I'll post it.  I am quite sure that if there had been any lingering possibility that McCain's birth records didn't pass muster that the left wouldn't have ever dropped the matter.

"i don't know.  i think it is a good thing that abortion is legal in the US, but i can also understand how opponents of it might be a little ticked off about the way it became so. "

"In the above example, interracial marriage was still illegal in sixteen US states before the Supreme Court decision in 1967.  Maybe it still would be without it."

And I think this was a bad way to go about it.  We could add Brown versus Board of Education as an example, too.  Bad methodology.  Let's not forget what the SC did in the Dred Scott decision.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford

Live by the court, die by the court. 

But I do not think that we would still be without it, for the reason why these decisions 'worked' and for why Roe vs Wade is not working.  Brown vesus Board, for example was in the mid 1950s.  By this time, there were already massive efforts to change things at the legislative level.  For example, by the time the Loving decision was made the Civil Rights Act had passed.  In other words, the momentum throughout the country was definitively trending towards integration, and this manifested all the way up into Congress, where Civil Rights legislation passed.  [to be clear, I am taking your examples as meaning that they are not demonstrable from the Constitution.  But I don't know that they aren't.]

Compare that with Roe vs. Wade.  There was not massive legislative efforts or notable legislative milestones 'holding' up that decision.  Because people weren't already generally persuaded, its been tooth and nails since.  In fact, RvsW was pushed through the courts because the fringe that pushed it knew they were the fringe- they could never have passed Federal legislation outlawing abortion.  The first Congress, ever, that might have (and we shall see) is taking office in 2009. 

"It seems like a very tenuous acquaintance from what i have read."

Why, because Obama said "He was just a guy in my neighborhood" and everyone believed him?  As argued in the article that I gave, that relationship was definitely something more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPLkf8GaUGA

"If Bush himself isn't a brutal dictator he has certainly endorsed and supported plenty of them, but somehow this passes under your radar of righteous indignation."

You are dodging the point.  You deny that if a person has associations and runs for president that people shouldn't know about them?  Your pot shots on Bush are irrelevant.  Address the point. Do voters have a right to this information or not?

"Something, sure.  You tried this with Hamas"

Tried nothing.  Accomplished. 

"it could mean any number of things, but you have to be careful not to project your beliefs onto others."

You're just being difficult.  It could also mean that Hamas are martian computers programmed to respond a certain way. Shall we consider that possibility, too?  At what point is an observation not a projection?  Are you saying that endorsements don't matter?  If McCain had been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, that wouldn't have raised any concern in your eyes?  If McCain had friends who were in the KKK you wouldn't have cared?  Nonsense.  An endorsement always means something.  It always means that the people doing the endorsing see something of value in the person.  Always.  That's the point of endorsements.  And endorsements work, or we wouldn't have them.

So, the real issue here is trying to filter out to what degree a person is answerable for the things that people see in them.  For Obama not to be a closet marxist, socialist, communist, and pacifist, he sure is getting an awful lot of support from these groups.  What are they seeing that you aren't?