One might therefore expect that Democrats would be in the process of preparing a devastating attack on Palin. After all, they learned from the failures of the Kerry campaign that the best defense is a good offense, and that defining your opponent is half the battle. So far, though, Palin’s arrival doesn’t seem to have led anyone in Chicago — home of Obama’s campaign headquarters — or Washington to tear up the battle plan for the fall (though Obama aides wouldn’t talk about their Palin strategy). Obama threw a quick ad on TV challenging Palin’s image as a maverick, but for the most part, the response in Obamaland to the debut of Palin has been to wait, let the press dig up dirt on her (and circulate the dirt when they do) and focus attention back on McCain. Dealing with Palin is politically tricky for now, in part because she’s so unknown. Strategists aren’t sure how much the movement in her direction is because she’s new and interesting, and how much of it will last once voters learn more about her. There’s also some risk of a backlash in launching an all-out frontal assault on a mother of five who’s not even on the top of the ticket.

But if Palin continues to be a phenomenon who can swing undecided voters into McCain’s column simply by reaching out to cultural touchstones — regardless of her position on issues –Democrats will surely ask themselves why they didn’t go nuclear on her when they still had the chance. For now, though, Democratic consultants and aides told Salon they don’t expect Palin to have the same impact on the race all fall as she has this week. Their attitude, in other words, is one that might have Democratic partisans tearing out their hair — wait and see. Push back a little, but mostly, cross your fingers and hope for the bounce to deflate.

“The general strategy — the best strategy — is ultimately, this is a race between Obama and McCain,” said one Democrat working on the fall campaign, who asked to remain anonymous to speak more openly about strategy. “Taking her [on] head on and kind of making the election about her — for even a short period of time — that, I don’t think makes a whole lot of sense.” Other Democrats agreed. “Vice-presidential selection is important, and certainly can produce interest and attention to a ticket — either positive or negative — but in the end I don’t think it really makes a lot of difference to the voting in November,” said Democratic consultant Tad Devine, who ought to know — he managed Lloyd Bentsen’s vice presidential campaign for Michael Dukakis, who went on to lose in a landslide in 1988. “It would be a big mistake to spend too much time dealing with her from the Democratic perspective.”

That’s because voters seem to like Palin far more than they like McCain, if recent polls are any indication. Once she joined the ticket, McCain moved ahead of Obama among white women, picked up independents and extended his lead among white men. Palin is getting people who otherwise weren’t planning to vote for McCain to come over to his side, because they liked her convention speech or find her fascinating. While the window for defining Palin is open now, she’s so much more popular than McCain that Democrats don’t want to spend too much time talking about her. The attention on Palin is “certainly not helpful” to Obama, Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said. “She’s a lot more exciting and a lot more interesting to a lot more people than [McCain] is. The most positive thing that people can say about him these days is that he picked her. [But] people are of two minds about her. On the one hand, they like her. On the other hand, they think she’s not up to the job of being president.”

So most of Obama’s newest ads are about the economy. “McCain’s policies seem hand-in-glove with President Bush,” one new ad running in Pennsylvania — where Palin’s “hockey mom” image could help McCain — says. “It’s George Bush economics, and we can’t afford more of the same.” The only ad to date that mentions Palin specifically, however, does accuse her of lying, and casts doubt on her “maverick” image. “Sarah Palin’s no maverick either,” says the announcer. “She was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it. Politicians lying about their records? You don’t call that maverick … you call it more of the same.”

Obama picked up the same theme on Tuesday in a press conference in Riverside, Ohio. “What we’re going to have to do is to see how things settle out over the next few weeks when people start examining who’s actually going to deliver on the issues that people care about,” he said. “You know, who’s got an education plan that is going to improve the prospects for our children? Who’s got a healthcare plan that is going to help a whole bunch of women out there who don’t have health insurance? Who is better equipped to change the economy so that the average person who is working hard feels like they can get ahead and see their incomes rise?”

Still, behind the scenes, both Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee have been aggressive in pointing out news stories about Palin’s record as Alaska governor — or about her alarming tendency to lie about it. Obama’s aides and allies don’t want to let the McCain camp’s version of who Palin is seep into the public consciousness unhindered. (In that version, Palin is a maverick reformer who bucked Republicans in Juneau, and by picking her, McCain proved his own credentials as … yes, you guessed it, a maverick reformer who bucked Republicans in Washington.) On Tuesday alone, more than two dozen e-mails about Palin from the DNC or the Obama campaign landed in my in box, highlighting everything from her habit of taking a per diem for sleeping in her own home to the flood of stories poking holes in her claim she stopped the “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska. Late in the day, the DNC launched a Web site comparing Palin to Dick Cheney.

“They thought they could create this mythology around her that confirmed everything that McCain would like the American people to think is righteous about him,” the Democratic strategist said. “It is important to make sure that that mythology, that narrative doesn’t take hold with independent, swing, moderate voters, those are still undecided.” If, instead, the coverage of Palin makes her seem like she’s exaggerating — or worse, just making up — her maverick past, Democrats would use that to link McCain to President Bush once again. “If we’re going to make this campaign about ‘more of the same’ versus ‘the change you can believe in,’ part of the more of the same that the American public is tired of is being lied to.” But changing the narrative could require more than just pushing stories to the press, unless the media gets more aggressive toward Palin — it might not work without TV ads or stump speeches behind it.

Attacking Palin directly could carry another pitfall for Obama (and running mate Joe Biden), besides taking the focus off McCain — creating sympathy for her. Republicans have tried to scare Democrats away from attacking Palin by declaring almost every criticism of her record to be rooted in sexism. “Traditionally, you wouldn’t really go after a vice-presidential candidate, and because she’s a woman and because of who she is, I can see it being a little bit fraught with danger,” said Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, who conducted focus groups on Palin’s convention speech with women voters in Las Vegas last week. Whether anyone buys the RNC’s new role as self-appointed guardian of feminism remains to be seen, but sure enough, on Tuesday, the Republican National Committee went after Biden for saying Palin’s policies would represent a step backward for women; the RNC accused Biden of saying “appalling” and “arrogant” things as part of an “old-style attack.” A few hours later, McCain’s campaign accused Obama of calling Palin a pig, after he said McCain and Palin’s effort to steal his “change” message amounted to “putting lipstick on a pig.” Joe Biden will probably follow tradition and reserve his sharpest rhetorical elbows for McCain at the vice-presidential debate next month; if he doesn’t, expect more cries of sexism from the GOP.

Actually, for now, a lot about Palin remains to be seen. Greenberg’s research found women mostly wanted to hear more about her; she didn’t instantly win anyone over to McCain’s corner, except Republicans who were already disposed to support him. “Is there something about her in particular” that will give McCain a longer bounce than usual, Greenberg asked? “I don’t think we know that yet.”

Simply by showing up at the convention and giving a good speech, Palin impressed a lot of voters. But that could turn out to have been another case of what another Republican governor from an oil-producing state once called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Once Palin leaves McCain’s side, heads out on the road on her own and starts doing more than just reading prepared speeches, will the luster wear off? Obama — and Democrats — are gambling that it will.

So Wallace, following a 92nd Street Y panel last night, said this:

“There will be pressure to elevate a woman but there will be an equal amount of pressure to pick someone who is prepared,” Wallace said.

And then she said this:

Wallace flagged one female official in particular who she thinks would be a good choice this year.

“Nikki Haley — she’s great,” she said. “She’s the most effective surrogate Romney has.”

If the Sarah Palin problem was a problem of preparation and vetting, Haley … might present some issues? Specifically an odd and mostly unsubstantiated sex scandal and also these rumors that she might at any moment be indicted on tax charges. The tax thing might be bullshit and the affair story was the product of a self-promoting creep but they’re “out there,” as they say.

More important, Haley has been governor of South Carolina since January of 2011. As in very slightly longer than one year. And slightly less time being a governor than Sarah Palin had in 2008. It’s almost as if Wallace is making a pick not based on the principle of Who Would Be Best For the Nation but on demographics and optics?

Wallace also apparently suggested Carly Fiorina, which, lol. Romney/Ex-CEO who famously received a giant golden parachute when she was forced out of her company 2012, everyone! Just the ticket for the new economy.

That is sort of a shame. The Palin thing is the most heavily over-covered story line of the entire 2008 campaign, so focusing on it might be totally logical from a marketing perspective, but it’s unfortunate from an artistic one. The film re-creates various moments of YouTube campaign ephemera very well — remember when that old white lady called Obama an Arab and McCain looked uncomfortable? When it takes us behind closed doors, it’s to witness scenes any moderately close observer of the election and its aftermath could’ve dreamed up him- or herself. It might have been fun to see a TV movie about the Democratic primary fight; the personality clashes of the disastrous Clinton campaign would have made for entertaining television, and Mark Penn is surely a creature crying out for a grotesque Emmy-winning portrayal by, say, Paul Giamatti.

Instead, McCain has won the nomination three-and-a-half minutes into the film. Soon we’re watching Julianne Moore watch Tina Fey on TV. You remember the “SNL” sketches making fun of Palin, right? In case you don’t, “Game Change” airs lengthy chunks from most of them. It also has tons of actual footage from CNN and MSNBC and Fox News, and it re-creates debates and speeches and the Couric interview and the Charlie Gibson interview and a bunch of other things you saw either live or on YouTube when they happened.

Moore’s performance is not just fair but maybe even flattering. (For one thing, she doesn’t hit those flat upper Midwest vowels as gratingly as the real Palin.) Woody Harrelson plays strategist Steve Schmidt — the film’s protagonist — as a grizzled, “too old for this shit” campaign veteran called back to the trail against his better judgment. Jamey Sheridan is given barely anything to do as Mark Salter, McCain’s “conscience.” Salter, the primary author of his “Maverick” mythos, is limited, after the Palin selection, to making a hilariously over-telegraphed face of concern as everyone else in the war room applauds her first speech.

But the film is about Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace because they were pretty clearly Halperin and Heilemann’s primary sources, and we watch them become horrified by the depths of Sarah Palin’s ignorance at exactly the same time as everyone else in America became horrified by her ignorance.

Because it’s Hollywood, there’s very little politics in the film’s depiction of politics. Policies are simply things for Sarah Palin to write on note cards and not memorize. Operatives confidently declare, in faux Sorkin-ese patter, that if this or that meaningless decision is made, it means “we’ll lose by five.”

There is a sheen of faux cynicism (McCain swears like a sailor!) but it masks complete naiveté: Everyone is basically honorable and decent. Nicolle Wallace — a member of the Bush administration communications team — is sincerely alarmed at the prospect of someone as dangerously ignorant as Sarah Palin in the White House. On election night, she breaks down in tears as she admits to Schmidt that … she didn’t vote. They embrace.

The film subscribes to the simplest theory of Sarah Palin: That she is childlike, vain and incredibly ignorant but also an essentially decent person and wonderful mother. The moments that come closest to “unfair” — Sarah Palin doesn’t know that the head of Great Britain’s government is the prime minister, not the queen — are basically plausible. This isn’t Andrew Sullivan’s conniving, dangerous pathological liar. It’s an overwhelmed working mother whose most unhinged moments are explained by a crash diet. Her convention speech is largely stripped of its snarling attack lines, imagining a world in which it appealed to “the base” because of Palin’s heartfelt commitment to special-needs children and not because she was very good at saying mean things about Obama. (The film actually repeats the bullshit story that her teleprompter broke midway through, and she kept going.) Even when the film has her take a major heel turn — “if I am single-handedly carrying this campaign, I am gonna do what I want!” — after “winning” her debate with Joe Biden (played by video footage of Joe Biden), she is still basically an innocent seduced by the adoration of riled-up crowds and national attention. (Todd Palin barely does anything.)

The constant use of actual news footage adds a bit of verisimilitude but also constantly raises the question of why this lightly fictionalized version of the election actually needs to exist. “Game Change” is not really for serious political junkies, who remember all the stuff that did happen and will scoff at the stuff that didn’t. (At one point, John McCain answers his ringing iPhone in the middle of the night. He used a BlackBerry, HBO.) But if casually politically involved people want to see their assumptions about Sarah Palin reinforced, well, there are still those “SNL” sketches.

In the end, the Republican operatives who foisted Sarah Palin on an unprepared nation are rightly horrified that they created a monster, but at no point does anyone act concerned that their actual candidate was himself an angry, warmongering old crank with extremely fungible principles. Sure, Sarah Palin didn’t know what the Fed did. Do we have any proof John McCain knew what it should’ve done? Maybe everyone actually was totally unfair to poor Sarah Palin.

Rice, the national security advisor in George W. Bush’s first presidential term and secretary of state in his second, is currently a professor at Stanford with the requisite right-wing think tank fellowship. She has not said or done anything “political” in years. But Curl has been hearing things!

America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.

After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.

Oh, a month-long tour in support of her book about her time in the Bush administration! She must be running for vice president, along with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Scott McClellan and George W. Bush.

There’s more. (And not just the part where Curl calls Rice “a spicy Rice dish” and waxes fetishistic about “her guns” being “a match for those of our first lady Michelle Obama.”)

Plus, her selection would be a giant chess move to counter the expected replacement of Vice President Joseph R. Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sure, the White House denies and denies, but that should really make any political watcher more suspicious. One White House insider even told me that the position swap was the only reason Mrs. Clinton joined the administration in the first place.

Curl has so many inside scoops packed into this column! I had no idea that our first presidential running mate swap since Ford’s 1976 campaign was basically a foregone conclusion and not just a weird Beltway journalist fantasy! But yes, I can see why the still  un-chosen GOP candidate would definitely be looking pretty closely at Rice — who’s been strongly making the case for her selection by not explicitly denying interest in the position — in case Obama replaces Biden with Clinton, which he will surely do.

The column gets worse (“Funny thing is, she is, unlike Barack Obama, an ‘American black’”) but that’s not really important. What’s important is exploring how someone like Condoleezza Rice ends up a perennial name on the fantasy ticket list.

Rice has been a subject of these columns since 2005, when she became Bush’s second secretary of state, and the White House tasked communications operative Jim Wilkinson — previously known best for inventing the false story of Jessica Lynch* — with getting Rice (and her boss) some much-needed positive press. Wilkinson did his job beautifully (remember when Rice’s knee-high boots were a topic of actual serious news coverage for weeks?) and Rice began receiving the “rock star” treatment.

In the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, author of the 2007 Rice bio “The Confidante,” summarized the exact moment of the birth of the presidential speculation:

In March 2005, before Rice sat for an interview with the Washington Times, Wilkinson slipped a note to the editorial page editor, Tony Blankley, suggesting that she be asked whether she would consider running for president. It was an audacious proposal — she had been secretary for only six weeks — but such speculation would bolster Rice’s image as a leader. (Wilkinson and Blankley said they do not recall the incident, but others present said they saw Wilkinson’s note.)

Oh, the Washington Times.

Shortly thereafter, Dick Morris wrote a book claiming — nay, insisting — that 2008 would be “Condi vs. Hillary.”

As Iraq descended into a violent civil war in 2006, Rice-for-president buzz bizarrely grew. There was enough of a false grass-roots movement for a paint-by-numbers AP trend piece with a silly nickname and everything. Tim Russert asked her point blank. As always, she said no in no uncertain terms.

Then, of course, everyone began to speculate that she’d be McCain’s running mate. Robert Novak claimed as much on Fox. Dan Senor said she was pushing for the pick on some Sunday show. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote a Talk of the Town piece on the subject! McCain and Rice both finally denied “reports” that she was angling for the spot on the ticket.

Now, I guess, it’s time to start up the rumor mill anew.

But before you put pen to paper on that column about how a Gingrich-Rice ticket would surely win moderate women in Ohio, consider this: In addition to the fact that she’s always denied wanting the job, and in addition to the fact that she was an unmitigated failure in the Bush administration, downplaying terrorism as a priority prior to 9/11 and selling the public on the Iraq invasion with untruths, Condi Rice is pro-choice.

*Update: Jon Krakauer recently rescinded his claim that Wilkinson, then a communications aide to General Tommy Franks, was responsible for the initial false Washington Post report on Lynch’s apparent heroics before her capture. Though Wilkinson was obviously involved in the PR campaign surrounding Lynch’s rescue and return to the U.S., he apparently isn’t responsible for falsifying her actions or leaking that false story to the press.

The New Black Panther Party is a cartoonish fringe group of a couple guys who play “’60s radical” dress-up and say mean things about whitey for Fox cameras in order to scare old white people. They have been explicitly rejected by the old Black Panther Party. For some reason, various conservatives have dedicated themselves to proving that this weird, marginal group of Nation of Islam cast-offs is somehow supported by or deeply connected to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration in particular, because, you know, Eric Holder and Barack Obama, those are two guys who very obviously share the values of extremist anti-white proponents of racial separation.

So Breitbart “proves” something or other about the essential anti-white racistness of the Obama campaign by noting that members of the inane New Black Panther Party were spotted by cameras near Obama, at various times, and also NBPP head Malik Zulu Shabazz spoke at the event.

(Brietbart goes on to publish two pictures of the event despite the photographer withholding permission, because “The First Amendment allows photographs of such enormous public importance to see the light of day.” Good luck with that argument in court?)

Andrew C. McCarthy gleefully endorses Breitbart’s story in a breathless post at the National Review’s The Corner:

This is a shocking story, and a breathtaking indictment of the mainstream media which went out of its way to avoid vetting Obama as a candidate — and to make sure anyone who tried to do due diligence got no sunshine. A candidate who chose to appeared in the company of, say, the KKK, would have provoked relentlessly hostile media coverage and, in short order, have been marginalized as disqualified to hold responsible elective office.

If only the media had reported that some fringe weirdos also participated in this event that both Democratic candidates and thousands of other people participated in, and then the fringe weirdos sort of followed Obama around for a while. That would’ve opened America’s eyes! (I mean the media besides NPR, which did report that the NBPP was there.)

Here’s the bit of this sad, desperate reach that is the saddest and most desperate: “Andrew further reminds us that, in March 2008, the Obama campaign website posted an endorsement of Obama by the New Black Panther Party.” Whoa, did they really? Shocking if true! It is, of course, not true. It was a user-generated blog post on the Obama campaign site that the campaign removed as soon as they became aware of its existence. Because websites do not “post” things to themselves, generally, McCarthy’s statement can’t even be charitably described as technically accurate. It’s just a lie.

A random stupid incorrect Breitbart smear is worth paying attention to only to the extent that the smear threatens to bubble up to the more reputable conservative press, or Fox, or Republican elected officials. The McCarthy endorsement means keep an eye on this one!

Here’s my reaction to those revelations: Sarah Palin is a person! She’s done drugs and pissed people off and slept with people, like 90 percent of American humans. If Sarah Palin was smart she’d dismiss the book with a chuckle, say nobody’s perfect, laugh off the “gossip,” and move on.

Sarah Palin might not be smart.

The Palins always prefer grand self-pitying martyrdom to quiet dignity, of course, which is why picking on them can be so profitable: They will always respond, and always help you drum up more publicity for your Palin-attacking venture. Instead of depriving the book of oxygen, they launched a multimedia attack on Joe McGinniss before he’d finished the first draft, and what they accomplished was … giving him more material and ensuring that even more breathless anticipation awaited the book’s release.

Now that the book’s rollout is underway, the Palins might as well get paid for their marketing efforts. Todd Palin angrily denounced it, again accusing McGinniss of having a “creepy obsession” with Sarah Palin. Oooh, it’s so creeeepy to write an unauthorized biography of a prominent public figure, right?

How bad did the Palins allowed themselves to be trolled? Sarah Palin’s people released a statement on behalf of Brad Hanson, Todd Palin’s former business partner, with whom Sarah Palin is alleged to have carried on an extramarital affair, some years back. The statement is a blanket denial, but what does having the supposed beau directly address the press accomplish, exactly? It just drives more interest in the book’s salacious, shocking revelations about the secret life of Sarah Palin. This guy, of all guys, should be kept out of it.

I am sure that Todd and everyone else is very personally pissed off that McGinniss went to Wasilla, talked to a bunch of people who hate them, and published a book full of stories about how bad and awful they are, but blowing up publicly just sends the message that there’s stuff in the book worth getting worked up about.