Palin Polling: So Far, A Wash

538 has the latest numbers from Rasmussen:
Voters have a favorable impression of her by a 53/26 margin; however, by a 29/44 margin, they do not believe that she is ready to be President. … 
At this stage, it is not clear how impactful her selection will be: 35 percent of voters say they’re more likely to [...]

More Qualms from the Right

Shannen Coffin at NRO:
Her career in the “city council” and as mayor of a town few outside of Alaska have ever heard of doesn’t exactly prepare her to preside over National Security Council meetings in the President’s absence, to serve as a close adviser to the President on counterterrorism issues, or to have the nuke [...]

Stay Away from the Trooper

As I said previously, if the Dems try to make an issue of the to-do over Palin’s state trooper brother-in-law, they’d be making a tactical mistake of the highest order. Flopping Aces has the details.

Palin a Buchananite?

There’s considerable evidence. The folks at Think Progress have questions. Good ones, I’d say, given my familiarity with the way Pat Buchanan’s take on 20th-century American history has evolved.

Drawing Dead

To continue the McCain/Palin poker-related analogies, David Frum thinks Obama just picked up the nuts:
It’s a wild gamble, undertaken by our oldest ever first-time candidate for president in hopes of changing the board of this election campaign. Maybe it will work. But maybe (and at least as likely) it will reinforce a theme that I’d [...]

McCain Throws the Hail Mary

Well, as commenter Ted predicted last Sunday, McCain has picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. The ’sphere is now all akimbo with everything from plaudits on the right for McCain’s brilliant play for the PUMAs to brickbats on the left comparing Palin to Dan Quayle.
I stick with my original take, which is [...]

One Conservative’s Take on Biden

James Poulos:
No, Biden is not a sign of desperation but its opposite: calm. Recall that Picking Biden is a giant kiss-off to the Democratic party since Clinton — and a reminder that Biden would have made, by championship long jumps, a better Presidential nominee than a hapless knob like Dukakis or a professional chump like Walter [...]

Obama/Biden

All in all, I don’t think the choice makes all that much difference to Obama’s chances. The more important thing is that it didn’t hurt, and didn’t create downstream problems in potentially running the government, as the choice of Clinton undoubtedly would have. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight basically agrees:
What’s noteworthy is not so much that [...]