Kevin Drum

FRED AND JOE....In case you're wondering where I've been for the past few hours, the answer is: I took the afternoon off. I really felt like I had to get away from Palin-mania for a few hours and clear my head. I'm sure I'll get back into the mix by tomorrow, though. In fact, maybe I'll even tell you about my Sarah Palin nightmare. Maybe.

But not right now. How about some reaction to Fred Thompson's keynote address instead? Do you think it was a good idea to dump Giuliani in his favor? Doesn't seem like it to me. I sat there waiting and waiting for Fred to deliver some red meat, and it almost never came. Finally, when it did, it seemed....sort of....blah. All the usual phrases were there, but Fred is so droopy sounding that it just didn't seem very rousing. The CNN talking heads seemed to think that it really energized the crowd on the convention floor, but I'm not so sure about that. They didn't look all that energized to me.

Still, this is the kind of thing that's almost impossible to judge if you're not the audience for the red meat. So maybe Fred did better than I thought. But my take, for what it's worth, is that they should have stuck with Rudy.

Joe Lieberman, on the other hand, who's speaking right now, strikes me as fairly effective. No red meat (yet), but that's not what he's there for. His flat, droning speaking style is probably just the ticket for this particular message, and he's doing a pretty good job of talking to the home audience and sounding oozingly sincere in his appointed role as bipartisan truth teller. His speech is a clear plus for McCain.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY....From David Brooks, commenting on the makeup of a possible John McCain administration:

"There simply aren't enough Republican experts left to staff an administration, so he will have to throw together a hodgepodge with independents and Democrats."

Do I dare ask what's happened to all our Republican experts over the past eight years?

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MEETING THE PRESS....Yesterday I wondered how long it would be until the McCain campaign was willing to let Sarah Palin out in public to meet with the national press. David Corn doesn't have an answer for us yet on this vital question, but today he moves the ball a few yards down the field:

On Monday night, I encountered Mark Salter, a top McCain adviser, outside the St. Paul Hotel, and I asked him when Palin's first press conference would be. Her did not seem eager to talk about it. "After the convention," he said. Soon after the convention? "After," he repeated. Whenever it occurs, it will be some session.

They definitely don't seem eager to find out what will happen when she sits down with reporters without a briefer present. No surprise there, especially since even McCain himself is none too eager to sit down with the press these days either. Considering the bloodbath that's just waiting to happen when they do, I guess I can't blame him.

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SARAH PALIN EXPLODES....This is ridiculous. I was only away from the computer for a few hours to watch the UCLA-Tennessee game (helluva second half, by the way) and all hell breaks loose. After only three days, the mainstream media now appears to be in full shark-circling mode over Sarah Palin. Pretty much any piece in today's newspapers would tell the story, but here's the New York Times:

A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain's choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.

On Monday morning, Ms. Palin and her husband, Todd, issued a statement saying that their 17-year-old unmarried daughter, Bristol, was five months pregnant and that she intended to marry the father.

Among other less attention-grabbing news of the day: it was learned that Ms. Palin now has a private lawyer in a legislative ethics investigation in Alaska into whether she abused her power in dismissing the state's public safety commissioner; that she was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party, which has at times sought a vote on whether the state should secede [more here on that –ed.]; and that Mr. Palin was arrested 22 years ago on a drunken-driving charge.

Aides to Mr. McCain said they had a team on the ground in Alaska now to look more thoroughly into Ms. Palin's background.

It's now plainly obvious that neither McCain himself nor anyone on the McCain team knew the first thing about Palin before they put her on the ticket. Among other things, they're refusing to say precisely how McCain found out about Bristol's pregnancy; the Washington Post has discovered that the supposedly pork-fighting Palin was actually a grand champion at hoovering up federal pork when she was mayor of Wasilla; and Edge of the American West has dug up a bunch of local dirt on Palin's, um, rather personal management style as mayor. Greg Sargent rounds up the whole thing here. As he says, it's a pretty remarkable performance for a mere few hours on a holiday weekend.

And hell, as long as we're on the subject, here's another thing I find puzzling. The New York Times piece confirms something we already knew, namely that up until the middle of last week McCain's top choice for running mate was either Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge. And he would have picked one of them except that word came back that the base would be furious if he chose a pro-choice veep. So he pulled a 180 and chose Palin instead. And the base has reacted rapturously.

But seriously: are they really that easy to sucker? It's plain where McCain's true sentiments lie: he would have chosen a pro-choice partner if he could possibly have gotten away with it. He only picked Palin out of absolute political necessity. And yet the Christian right reacted as giddily as if he had genuinely seen the light.

So I guess the answer is: yes, they really are that easy to sucker. Pretty amazing.

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