kane

These are the reasons I say she failed.

First http://www.electoral-vote.com/ Look at states like N. Carolina, Virgina, Missouri, Iowa and Indiana. These are states that have a large number of Evangelicals in them and are traditionally heavy republican states and she has done nothing to help swing them back in his favor. Sure she has fired up some of the base, but clearly not all of them.

Second http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epo...obama-225.html . this is a site that shows all the regular polls and averages them out. Look at the graph in the middle of the page. You can see McCain behind since the start then at the time he announces Palin and goes to the republican convention he gets a spike and takes a brief lead. Now he is right back where he was before he picked her. She has had a zero sum effect on the national polls.

The third, http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/...tml#cnnSTCText, is that around 36% (up from 26% a month ago) of independent voters have an unfavorable opinion of her and her favorable rating has dropped from somewhere around 60% a month ago to around 48% now. Also Rasmussen says only 29% of the people polled believe she is ready to be president (compared to the 49% that believe Biden is ready). In many cases this shouldn't matter. You vote for president not VP, but McCain is old and has had cancer 4 times and that clearly is weighing on people's minds. There is a higher than average chance that something could happen to him in office and we would then have her as president so people are looking at her more closely than they normally would and more closely than they are Biden.

McCain needs to win as many independents as he possibly can because Obama appears to have activated the far left base and it appears he is going to be able to turn out large numbers of democrat voters in places that democrats have failed in the last 20 years. If nearly 40% the independents don't like your VP and only 29% of them think she could fill in for the president she is not really much of an asset to him. Also, it doesn't help when you hide your VP candidate from the media and then when she finally does do interviews with someone that is not a republican pundit she comes off very badly. The debate did help her some, but really it wasn't that impressive of an effort and she came off more like a kid giving a book report and trying to look cute than a real VP candidate.

Anyway, these are my reasons why I say the hail mary pass that is Palin failed. She was meant to be a game changer and McCain is right were he was (and sinking) before he ever added her to the ticket.