[TChad]

..brought nothing to the ticket except a surefire knack for exciting voters who were already reliably Republican.

I wonder how accurate that is.

[2ndDivisionVet]

For one thing, there were thousands of PUMA websites last year. Do people put time and energy into a website or blog and then vote the opposite? Also, remember our friends at ACORN, the New Black Panthers, NOI, etc. that almost certainly cost the GOP hundreds of thousands of votes in districts all over the country. Now they’ve been given FIVE BILLION DOLLARS as part of the stimulus. Any guess as to what they’re going to use that for?

[new cruelty]

Good question. From my very limited experience, I've never met a moderate or a liberal that decided to vote for mccain because of Governor Palin. She scared off a few Jewish voters that I know who were mulling over voting for mccain. They really disliked her anti-abortion views.

[EDINVA]

Unlike liberals, conservatives WILL stay home on election day if they don’t like what’s on the menu. What the inside-the-beltway elite within the GOP are missing is that the base Murphy so easily assumes would have supported McCain regardless of his running mate are the very folks turned off by moderate positions on immigration such as McCain advanced (or tried to). They are NOT “reliably Republican.”

The RNC/Bush White House and the McCain amnesty crowd turned off conservatives to the extent that they lost the Congress in ‘06. Had McCain not chosen Palin (or someone equally able to reenergize the ‘base’) McCain would have been lucky to get 40% of the 2008 vote.

Whether Sarah Palin chooses to go for the GOP nomination in ‘12, and whether she should be the nominee are questions for another day. But she will surely know who to hire and not should she decide to make it a run. These guys are revealing themselves in extraordinary ways.