McCain was running a centrist campaign so there were bound to be a few center-left hacks enamored with the mystique of conservative-hating journalists. In retrospect those absurdly one-sided anti-Palin leaks about her intelligence were probably inevitable. The post-election piling on, though, makes it look like there were multiple people passing slime to eager reporters. Ergo Operation Leper:

RedState is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper. We're tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details. We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you'll see us go to war against those candidates. It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.

The ostracism isn't justified just because these people are vicious. If they think Palin was a mistake then they're also bad at their jobs. McCain couldn't have made a better choice. Full stop. Stan and I were texting back and forth the night before McCain announced his choice and the last thing I wrote to him was that I was hoping for Palin. So much for the MSM's "no one had ever heard of her" myth.

I don't think I'm revealing any state secrets when I say that I never thought this election would be close. As a matter of undeniable empirical fact, Americans just don't know stuff. Worse: thanks in no small part to decades of liberal self-esteem movements, what they lack in knowledge they overcompensate for through inordinate reliance on inchoate gut feelings. See here and here for some terrifying examples, and here for K-Lo trying to cope with the aftermath.

When pollsters produce numbers about issues they're basically just making shit up. It's not that they're getting opinions wrong as much as they're pretending that there are opinions at all. People certainly do respond in such and such amounts to such and such questions in such and such ways. But that doesn't mean that there are deep beliefs beneath those answers. Much of the time it's the opposite - just a bunch of people responding firmly to questions they know very little about but suspect they should understand.

In the booth, though, citizens vote on what they do have access to - those inchoate gut checks. Pollsters can't measure "gut checks" directly. But they can get a pretty good sense of how people feel - and feelings are all many citizens have - from really simplistic right track/wrong track polling. And the right track/wrong track numbers haven't even been close this year. Given the spread Democrats probably actually underperformed.

If the election was hopeless then all of the nonsense about how Palin alienated independents is naive at best but more likely just dishonest. Independents were never really in play. The post-hoc excuses they're giving to themselves and exit pollsters are good and fine - but let's not pretend that anybody actually takes them seriously. So the job of the GOP candidate was to limit losses and prevent a Democratic supermajority. That meant boosting fundraising and whipping up out the base - two tasks at which Palin is just diabolical: