Prediction: Palin will make or break the race for McCain

It occurs to me that this election's outcome largely rests on one person. The performance of which will be critical .
If Sarah Palin doesn't handle the pressure and can be successfully called a "Quayle" then it's over for McCain. If she can handle it and does real well (which I'm betting on) It's a knife to Obama's heart. Her very existence proves him wrong.

The conventional media/left expectation for the VP debates... oh that can be so wonderful. Remember, Biden was against the Trans-Alaskan pipeline. So, she knows her state would be poorer by billions and the US's energy hole would be even deeper if Biden got his way.

Jonah Goldberg has thoughts along that line.

I've been thinking about it and I think the bottom line on Palin is pretty simple. If she does a good job at the convention and survives about three weeks of serious media scrutiny — no horrible gaffes, no unforgivable I-don't-knows to gotchya questions (fair and unfair), no botched hostile interviews — she will emerge as the single most inspired VP pick in modern memory and she will give the Democrats migraines for a long time to come, assuming there are no terrible skeletons we don't know about. But, if she screws up in the next three weeks, gives the press and the late night comedians sufficient fodder to Quayelize her, she'll be seen as anything from a liability to an outright horrible pick. That's it.

Roger Kimbal has some thoughts on the style differences between the two campaigns.

There is a big difference in style between the McCain and Obama campaigns. If you go to Obama’s web site, you'll find lots of complaints about the smears,“outrageous lies,” etc. supposedly perpetrated by the other side. An example? The most recent is the hysterical attack on the journalist Stanley Kurtz who has been looking into Obama’s early political career, not least his association with the terrorist Bill Ayers. In fact, Stanley Kurtz is simply doing what political journalists do: filling out the historical record and illuminating the origins, associates, and early career of a man who has put himself forward to be President of the United States.

On the McCain web site, by contrast, there is no whining about how unfair the other side treats him. Obama asks us to “believe in” him; McCain asks us to consider what is best for the country. For him, action, not belief is the issue. (A lot could be written, in fact, about Obama’s quasi-religious rhetoric: it’s one thing to ask people to believe that one candidate has the better vision for the country; it is quite another for a candidate to ask us to believe in him and his vision.)

Watching Sarah Palin’s speech yesterday I found myself almost feeling sorry for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Almost. Here they are campaigning on “change” and optimism and the common man and transcending politics as usual. And their campaign is the same old business and usual, Chicago-style swamp politics. If it were an athletic contest, McCain/Palin would probably have to play with some sort of handicap. But it wouldn’t matter. Even with a steep handcap they would eat Obama and Biden for lunch. The carnage will not be pretty. But perhaps it will finally get the message through to the DNC: you don’t win elections by vapid talk about change. You win them by sound policies that offer change where change is needed and continuity where change would be irresponsible.

Victor Davis Hanson spots a 3rd trap door for the Obama camp.

We are supposed to believe that a first- term Alaskan governor is less qualified for the second spot than a first-term Illinois Senator is for the Presidency—who once again just announced to the nation that he is ready to invade nuclear Islamic Pakistan to get bin Laden, who wanted all troops out of Iraq by March 2008, and who once dismissed Iran as a small threat. Next in their wisdom they will go after Gov. Palin's husband—and therein re-invite comparison with Michelle's wise declarations.

Again, I think the irony is lost—that as old-pro McCain matches the experience of old-pro Biden, so too fresh -face Palin emphasizes fresh-face Obama, but, then, one is supposed to be our President, the other the Vice President. And whereas McCain was suggesting that the Presidential nominee was too inexperienced and thus subject to charges of partianship, now the Obama team will be making just those charges against Palin, and thus by comparison making McCain's original case against themselves.

I don't know if they'll be stupid enough to go after Gov. Palin's husband, but it would not shock me.