Fivethirtyeight.com:

… picturing a young, attractive, kooky, female governor from Alaska who has an accent straight out of Fargo in the White House is going to be a much bigger leap for many voters than picturing Barack Obama there.

At first I was disappointed he didn’t pick Romney. Romney would have been so much fun to run against. And it’s possible Palin could fire up the base. Instead of aborting a Down-Syndrome baby, she Chose Life. She’s pro-gun, pro-creationism.

But this still seems like a total joke. Harriet Miers redux — she won’t make any major mistakes, but something just doesn’t seem right. This is an example of that vaunted “judgment” McCain keeps attributing to himself?

So the presidential nominee of one major party is from Hawaii, and the vice presidential nominee of the other major party is from Alaska. Noncontinental U.S. states represent!

She comes out of nowhere, she’s younger than Obama, and she’s been a state governor for less than two years. And she’d be a heartbeat away from a 72-year-old man’s presidency.

This pretty much undermines one of McCain’s key arguments against Obama.

She seems vastly underqualified to be president.

Is she going to be the Harriet Miers of the VP process?

God dammit.

[Obama] paid the obligatory homage to Mr. McCain’s military service and sacrifice as a Vietnam prisoner of war, but then raked him for impugning his motives and patriotism. …

“I have never suggested and never will that Senator McCain picks his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition. I have not suggested it because I believe that he genuinely wants to serve America’s national interest. Now, it’s time for him to acknowledge that I want to do the same.”

Enough with the high road already. It doesn’t work. Obama is trying to play Bill Clinton to John McCain’s Bob Dole, “honoring his service” and thereby implying that the old coot’s day has passed. But this isn’t 1996 and you’re not Bill Clinton, an incumbent president in good economic times.

And McCain isn’t honoring you at all. McCain is doing what he needs to do. Going on the attack day after day is working for him and hurting you.

Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight.com — which has become one of my daily political reads — puts it well:

[I]t’s worth remembering that McCain won the Republican primaries in large part because the other candidates were so deferential to him. Rudy Giuliani praised McCain incessantly during the debates of last summer, at which point McCain’s campaign was in tatters and didn’t seem like much of a threat. But guess where Rudy’s supporters went once McCain won New Hampshire?

The Republicans, of course, have no such inhibitions when it comes to Democrats, which is why they went right at Al Gore’s strengths, and right at John Kerry’s strengths, and are going right at Barack Obama’s strengths — and, importantly, did so early in those respective campaigns. It’s one of the big reasons that they win elections.

I almost hope Obama picks Hillary as his running mate. At least she’d go on the attack. At least she wouldn’t have compunctions about smearing McCain. At least she understands Republican politics.

Obama needs to stop trying to use the American people as a laboratory for his ideas about political theory. He needs to actually try to win this thing.

The guy is driving me nuts.