The Reformers who seem to want to destroy Sarah Palin are picking an incredibly self-destructive fight for the simple reason that, as a political matter, Palin is popular and they aren’t (How many divisions does David Brooks have?). Rather, they should be fighting to win Palin and Palin supporters to their cause.
Palin is popular?
A reader writes:
After the last few papers came trickling in, the final tally (according to Wikipedia) in the endorsement race is 495 newspapers for Obama, 215 for McCain (40.5 million circulation to 12.4 million)
Dailies: 296 to 180
Weeklies: 111 to 32
College papers: 78 to 2
Alternative weeklies: 57 to 0
A reader writes:
I voted here in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood about two hours ago. It took about an hour to get through the line, and while standing there I was chatting with the 75-year-old retired cop in front of me, and the young 30-something gay couple in front of him, who had their two little girls in tow.
Everyone was in good spirits as the conversation moved from the Obama-McCain contest to the farce that is Sarah Palin, and then on to non-political matters, like the road work being done on the next block. The conversation between the cop and the couple started to get animated toward the end of our hour in line as the three men began to discuss the current football season, wagering bets for this weekend’s games and making predictions for the Super Bowl.
And then, as we entered the firehouse that doubled as our polling place, as the couple and their daughters stepped out of line and up to the table to receive their ballots, I observed the cop in front of me. He opened his sample ballot, took out his pen, scribbled out his "yes" vote on Proposition 8, and filled in the ballot line for "no."
I don’t think he knew that I observed him. And since it was such a private moment I held back my tears of joy and my overwhelming desire to pat him on the back and say "thank you, sir." Instead, I left the polling place muttering to myself those two words you have repeated over and over during this election cycle, Andrew:
KNOW.
HOPE.
(Photo by a reader in Sacramento)
Marc has the first take. So far: as expected.
My old friend Stephen Rodrick was all prepared to vote for McCain, and then he got into the voting booth.
Palin won’t say who she voted for:
Palin was asked during the press conference whether she voted for Sen. Ted Stevens. “I am also exercising my right to privacy and I don’t have to tell anyone who I voted for, nobody does, and that’s really cool about America, also,” she said.
A reader writes:
I’ve been living in Columbia, South Carolina, for a little over two years in a predominantly black working class neighborhood, and I’ve voted twice. Each time, I never saw another voter, just poll workers. Today, I showed up at 9 AM and waited for over two hours to vote. The crowd was overwhelmingly African American, young and old. I was actually pretty surprised by the number of young people lined up. My husband talked to a man, African American and around 50 years old, in front of us throughout the wait. When we finally got to the voting booths, he confessed that this was his first time voting.
JPod imagines what would happen if McCain won the electoral college but lost the popular vote:
A McCain presidency under these conditions would be a model of institutional paralysis. With the exception of the veto, which McCain would of course relish more than any other presidential power, he would be among the weakest chief executives in modern times, if not the weakest. And it would be interesting to see whether the Electoral College itself could survive it. (It would be abolished, presumably, not by amending the Constitution but by passing laws in the states requiring electors to vote for the nationwide vote winner; such a law already exists in a few of them.)
The Dish 