Whoooopsie!

If Team McCain really thought picking Yukon Barbie would help them with women, they have another think coming:

The first national polls on John McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin yesterday came out today from Rasmussen and Gallup — and contrary to what the GOP probably hoped, she scored less well with women than men.

[…]

There is wide uncertainty about whether she’s qualified to be president. In the poll, taken Friday, 39% say she is ready to serve as president if needed, 33% say she isn’t and 29% have no opinion.

That’s the lowest vote of confidence in a running mate since the elder George Bush chose then-Indiana senator Dan Quayle to join his ticket in 1988. In comparison, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden was seen as qualified by 57%-18% after Democrat Barack Obama chose him as a running mate last week.

Oooops.

They’re Making Perot Look Good

The McCain campaign continues its bizarre drunken joyride across the American landscape. Their main strategy seems to be making their rivals laugh themselves to death.

I thought that they’d already vetted Palin, but apparently not, as only now are they sending people up to Alaska to check out the Troopergate story.

One justification for picking Palin: Winning over Hillary supporters. That’s going to be a mite difficult in view of her anti-choice stance, and even more so as more people hear about these comments she made at a Newsweek-sponsored event in March for women politicians:

Once onstage, together with Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Palin talked about what women expect from women leaders; how she took charge in Alaska during a political scandal that threatened to unseat the state’s entire Republican power structure, and her feelings about Sen. Hillary Clinton. (She said she felt kind of bad she couldn’t support a woman, but she didn’t like Clinton’s “whining.”)

I wonder if they even realize that she backed Romney in the primaries? Or that she laughed in approval as a radio host mocked a colleague of hers who’d survived cancer as being herself a “cancer” and a “bitch”?

This starts to make a perverse kind of sense once we find out that Palin wasn’t McCain’s choice, but was forced upon him because the Fundies that make up the GOP’s base would openly revolt if he went with Lieberman, his favorite by far. (Which is funny as hell, because the Fundies have been spending the last decade or so trying to present themselves as genuine friends of the Jews — or at least of neocon Likudnik types like Lieberman — and not only because they want Israel to be the launching pad for Armageddon.) Ralph Reed is happy as can be, and so is James Dobson, because McCain’s being forced to pick the arch-Fundie Palin over Lieberman, Romney, Pawlenty, or any other top-ranked choice shows once again that the Fundies can vex and control any Republican they choose.

Has McCain Written Off Michigan?

Before John McCain picked Yukon Barbie to be his running mate, there was a lot of buzz that he’d choose Mitt Romney. There was one particular reason for Mitt: the state where his father governed and is still remembered as a good man. Mitt Romney won the presidential primary, and the conventional wisdom was that he’d deliver Michigan in the general election.

It’s currently a close race in Michigan, so it’s hard to believe that he thinks he’ll win without Mitt. And Michigan has gone blue since 1992.

So, did McCain decide there are more PUMAs out there for the picking than Michigan voters?