10/9/08: Blame Palin for Palin’s freefall, NOT the economy

I’m just plain tired of hearing Pat Buchanan and some other Repubs defend McCain’s disastrous pick of Palin for VP, and even more sick of them claiming the reason for her (and McCain’s) freefall in the eyes of the American people is due to the Wall Street crash that cut off their rise!!! Give me a break. Sure, a bad economy always helps the challenger, but in terms of their personal popularity, Jack and Jill are tumbling down the hill because Americans got just a couple of close looks at this vapid VP pick, and THEY DIDN’T LIKE WHAT THEY SAW!!!!

To put their stupid denials to bed once and for all, I have taken the daily tracking poll of their ratings (conducted for The Daily Kos by a non-partisan pollster) and drawn lines corresponding to the major dates in Palin’s brief national political career. The top graph shows the Presidential poll and the lower one the favorable/unfavorable ratings for each candidate (Obama, Biden, McCain and Palin). The first obvious takehome is that Palin’s slide (which dragged McCain down too) started on 9/13, the day after Charlie Gibson’s interview with Palin was aired on ABC. The Dow crashes occurred on 9/15 and 9/17 and did absolutely nothing to hasten the slide (nor did the bailout failures). In fact, both their ratings recovered slightly after 9/21, but then came Couric’s interview and McCain’s ridiculous “(non)suspension” of his campaign on 9/24, and well, nothing has been able to save them since. The VP debate on 10/2 gave Palin a very tiny fillip only to continue falling the next day, and it’s only getting steeper with their sleaze-slinging of the last few days. On the other hand, people got a great look at Obama in the first debate, and said "He could and should be the Next President of the USA!" and they haven't stopped voting for him since - in the most recent Gallup poll, Obama opened up a 11 point lead over McCain (52-41), the biggest ever.

So let me say once more, in this case at least: It’s NOT the economy, stupid! In fact, it’s the stupid, stupid. The more people see of this pouffed-up, lipsticked pitbull, the less they like. Which is why the Repubs are too afraid to ever let her talk with a real reporter again, trotting her out twice a day in front of carefully preselected, commited wingnuts (with the Old Man of the Sea hovering protectively over her). Well, that’s just fine with me, in just over 3 weeks, they will both be relegated to the scrap heap of history, bearing the unenviable label of having run the dirtiest and least successful campaign in our lifetime.

Since I know that the selfsame wingnuts will deride this analysis since it was sponsored by (gasp!) an Obama-leaning website, I also took a recent graph from pollster.com, showing the average of 56 national polls and breaking it down by gender. You can see that the swing towards Obama among both men and women started right about the time of the Gibson interview, and the crashes of the Dow or the vacillations of the bailout had no effect whatsoever, supporting the detailed analysis above.