The Hitchhiker's Guide to Mo-dom

On Palin’s Life: Palin’s life has sometimes played out like an unholy amalgam of Desperate Housewives and Northern Exposure.

Seriously?! You’re not running for VP of Alaska: ‘Frequently, she would be concerned about how something would play in Alaska. What? You’re worried about your backside in Alaska when there are hundreds of millions of dollars being spent?” One longtime McCain friend and frequent companion on the trail was heard to refer to Palin as “Little Shop of Horrors.’

On her opponent’s debating skills: ‘Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, Does any of this really matter’

Dramatic!: But there were ominous signs—indications of an erratic nature. This is the third thing McCain could have discovered about Palin—a woman, after all, who kept a pregnancy secret for seven months, flew all the way home from Texas to Alaska with a near-full-term baby while leaking amniotic fluid, and then finally drove the 45 minutes from Anchorage to a hospital in Wasilla, all so that the child could be born in the 49th state.

I Like cows too, but I should not be Director of the State Division of Agriculture: As governor, she hired several old high-school, hometown, or political friends with minimal qualifications for important state jobs. One friend, a former mid-level manager for Alaska Airlines, headed the department that reviewed candidates for state boards and commissions; another became director of the state Division of Agriculture, citing a childhood love of cows as one qualification.

Palin is God?!: When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it ‘Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father’

On her AG pick, Wayne Anthony Ross (I dislike lima beans as well): He had sown controversy over the years by referring to gays and lesbians as ‘degenerates’ (he later sought to downplay the remark, saying his aversion to homosexuals was no different from his aversion to lima beans)

Make her go away: In recent rounds of long conversations, most made it clear that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt: they can’t quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be. They quietly ponder the nightmare they lived through. Do they ever ask, What were we thinking? ‘Oh, yeah, oh, yeah,’ one longtime McCain friend told me with a rueful chuckle. ‘You nailed it.’

So, he’s a typical 72 year old man; Apalling Egotism, Heedlessness, and Lack of Judgment: None of McCain’s still-loyal soldiers will say negative things about Palin on the record. Even thinking such thoughts privately is painful for them, because there is ultimately no way to read McCain’s selection of Palin as reflecting anything other than an appalling egotism, heedlessness, and lack of judgment in a man whose courage, tenacity, and character they have extravagantly admired—and as reflecting, too, an unsettling willingness on their own part to aid and abet him.

Burn!: In November, he told Jay Leno he was proud of Palin and did not blame her for his defeat, but by April, when Leno asked him about who was running the Republican Party, McCain declined to mention Palin: ‘We have, I’m happy to say, a lot of choices out there: Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty, Huntsman, Romney, Charlie Crist—there’s a lot of governors out there who are young and dynamic.’ McCain went on, ‘There’s a lot of good people out there, and I’ve left out somebody’s name and I’m going to hear about it.’