A HOCKEY SKATE IN THE FACE FOREVER

Sure John McCain's attack ads are great on TV or on your computer, but don't you really want to experience them live?

No?

Me either. But that's what the Sarah Palin stump speech has turned into, apparently -- the concert version of the last couple of months of McCain's campaign. Watch the first half of this clip from a Palin appearance in Florida today -- after about a minute on Bill Ayers, she segues into a medley of Steve Schmidt's greatest attack-ad hits. They're way better than the studio versions!



Is this what America wants hear right now? Is this what swing voters want to hear right now? Compared to this, the campaigns of George W. Bush were masterpieces of uplift.

And then in the second half of the clip, after a brief invocation of Ronald Reagan (another shout-out to the base, which you'd think would be long since locked down by now), we get this:

You know, from now until Election Day, hang on to your hats, because, you know, it may get kinda rough here in terms of campaigns having to step up and kinda take the gloves off and start tellin' the truth about what a candidate stands for.

So I guess it's going to get even worse.

Is there a plan here? Some set of policies to get us through the next four years? As far as I can see, it's just wall-to-wall red meat, a partisan pep rally with little content and zero outreach, delivered by a person the public just can't take seriously in a way that confirms everyone's impression that she has an emotional age of fourteen.

Maybe I'm wrong and it's going to work, but it seems to me we've never seen Palin speak for more than three minutes without taking a swat at someone (and enjoying it way too much). That's not how you sell your ticket as presidential. Even candidates running the nastiest possible campaign go positive at great length once in a while (see: Poppy Bush's convention speech in '88), but we still have never seen Palin do it. And she's the face of this campaign.

(Via Hot Air.)