Sarah Palin: The Backlash Has Now Gone Full Circle

Oh what a difference a week (or so) can make. The weekend before last when McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his vice presidential running mate, the media pounced. She was a nobody, she had no experience, how dare he pick somebody that we have not vetted ourselves?

Those attacks quickly degenerated into questions about her children. Wild accusations that seemed to be based more on the song I'm My Own Grandpa than on reality. Andrew Sullivan, admittedly while trying to be civil for a change, referred to Sarah Palin's family as f-ing rednecks.

Now that the polls are in and McCain is up and Palinmania shows no signs of being a flash in the pan, the attacks, now veiled, have come full circle. This article by Andrew Malcolm at the Los Angeles Times suggests that while Palin is the VP candidate, she is really the Number 1 on the ticket. McCain is an afterthought. It is all about Sarah all the time. Malcolm's article is hard to gauge. Are sections like this:

He snatched the 44-year-old female reformer from the....

...political oblivion of the largest state, where her approval rating had slipped to 80%, about 10 times better than Congress' approval rating. And McCain threw her onto the national stage.

Where she didn't stumble. Yet.

positive or negative? OK, so she's popular. She hasn't stumbled. Yet. I suppose it is inevitable, then, that she will make a fool of herself?

The piece ends with:

Oh, and another good thing about Palin's brief return home: The top of the GOP ticket can get back to hearing the crowds cheer him for a change.

How remarkable. So not only is Sarah Palin not a weak candidate, she is such a strong candidate that she is overshadowing poor, poor, insignificant John McCain. As I stated above, what a difference a week makes.