Has anyone noticed that Sarah Palin’s central claim to political fame is a fraud? She represents herself as a fiscal conservative who abhors pork-barrel projects and said no thanks to the “bridge to nowhere” — a $398 million span that would have linked Ketchikan, Alaska, to its airport across the Tongass Narrows. But as mayor of Wasilla (pop. 9,780), she hired a Washington lobbyist to bring home the bacon. And just two years ago as a candidate for governor, she supported both the Ketchikan bridge and the congressional earmark that would have paid most of its cost.

I know, we’re not supposed to pay attention to such inconvenient details. We’re supposed to be dazzled by how unaffected she is, how plain-spoken, how “genuine.”

Indeed, if you don’t get hung up on her actual record, Palin simply is who she is. It’s not her fault that she’s a former Miss Wasilla with a campy “Northern Exposure” vibe, doctrinaire social-conservative views and no discernible qualifications for being vice president. It’s undeniable that people in Alaska apparently like her well enough, though they seem to have been even more shocked than the rest of us when she was named to the Republican ticket. In any event, she’s not the one who created this farcical situation.

I’m pretty sure I watched this columnist appear as a talking head this weekend on one of the news shows. He makes for a better columnist than five second blurb automaton.

McCain’s veep choice just seems to get worse each day, even as the GOP establishment attempts to paint a more glowing picture. The interweb is abuzz now with revelations that Palin wasn’t even in the running until late in the game, as conservative pundits shot down any notion of a pro-choice vice president. (I’m going to puke the next time someone gushes about McCain being a maverick.) Apparently the team assigned to vet Palin arrived in Alaska the day before McCain made his announcement.

With time running out - and as Senator McCain discarded two safer choices, Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, as too predictable - he turned to Mrs Palin, meeting her on Thursday for an interview and offering her the job moments later. Advisers to two of the finalists on McCain’s list described an intensive vetting process for those candidates that lasted one to two months.
…
Aides to Senator McCain said they now had a team in Alaska to examine Mrs Palin’s background. A Republican with ties to the campaign said the team assigned to vet her in Alaska had not arrived there until last Thursday.

And of course there’s the 17-year-old pregnant daughter and the husband’s (ancient) drunk driving charge… These will have an affect on the campaign, for better or worse. But I’m more interested in Eugene Robinson’s point revolving around Palin’s support o’ pork and her support of some goofball Alaskan successionist political party. Oh, and the possibility of McCain, 72, not being able to serve his full term and Palin stepping up to the plate. Didn’t we just have eight years of an unqualified presidential puppet?

All of this as hurricane Gustav deflects attention from the RNC convention and as polling results begin to trickle in post-DNC convention - particularly among former Hillary supporters. Obama seems to have received a healthy bump, with all of the major polls putting him between 6% and 9% ahead of McCain (with the CNN poll a bit of an anomaly at only 1%). That’s a healthy 3-5% bump from the week before. With Gustav putting a damper on the start of the RNC convention, it’ll be an interesting few weeks to watch the polls.

If there’s a silver lining for McCain, he raised about $47m during the month of August. This is close to the $50m Obama raised in July, but more than likely a lot less than the Democrat will have raised in August (not revealed as of this post).