I don't need - and I say this as an Iowan who has had the opportunity to be in a small room and ask direction questions of three of the 4 candidates in this race - a candidate for national office to sit at my table and explain their plans.  I need them to convincingly demonstrater their ability to think and lead.  You don't lead a country via one-on-one conversations, you do it through mass channels.

Hmmm... Palin is going to have to calibrate her actions till Election Day to be aggressive enough to rouse the base in the 2012 presidential primary, but not be so tough that it repels everyone else.

She is a subtle creature of nuance, I'm sure she can handle it.

There will be conservatives who claim that McCain should have been more negative, but none of those conservatives will have much of a chance to succeed in national politics in the next decade or so.  She's being very smart if she is disassociating herself from the campaign strategy---she has enough non-base conservative elements in her record to potentially transcend the base, but her attack-dog role this year will make that more difficult.  inching back toward the center is the smart move.

If I called all the shots, and if I could wave a magic wand,

Dept. of Redundancy Dept. calling.

I would be sitting at a kitchen table with more and more Americans. And how does she propose doing this? Lord knows there are enough photo ops of them meeting people in diners, at factories, etc. Hell, Joe the Plumber did discuss things with Obama (have not seen anyone ever discussing anything with you though dearie) and we see where this has gotten us.

I think, is kind of draining out there in terms of Americans' attention span. Since Sarah is the master of short attention spans, I will give this one to her.

I hear he's much hotter in person than on TV.

Hmm, off-message, and I think also just jealous at how much Obama is outraising McCain, and can therefore afford all those ads.

At this point, I think anything she says to distance herself from the strategy of the campaign serves her long-term interests. SHe doesn't have to be harshly critical, just drop a few words here and there about small things she would have done differently. She knows that Limbaugh and the Fox buffoons think she is the hottest thing going, and the echo chamber will build up the message that it all would have turned out differently if only Palin had been calling the shots.

The Palin, when asked about negative campaigning, offered, "I have nothing to lose."  She does not.  This is the Republicans having their shit and eating it; the bad cop-worse cop routine.  I don't this there is any grand strategy there; there is, in fact, no there, there, as has been observed many times.

Too late. I thought she should have taken this tack from the beginning:

"she has enough non-base conservative elements in her record to potentially transcend the base, but her attack-dog role this year will make that more difficult"

Bingo, ryan. She could have run as a socially conservative, reformist, positive, plain-spoken VP candidate if the McCainiacs had groomed her right. They blew it (though they might have blown it by picking someone who stumbled so much too).

I guess CW says that Mike Murphy and John Weaver wanted McCain to run a campaign for the center, as an independent maverick who bucked his own party. Imagine if McCain had been running ads for a year or two in which he grills Rumsfeld in the Senate, in which conservatives condemn him. True, lots of base voters would peel off...I don't know, perhaps it wouldn't have worked (the economic similarities to Bush are a huge problem), but it certainly would have been a more dignified way to go out, which it looks like McCain is going to be doing anyway. Instead we got a schizo campaign which seems more concerned with the base than the center but which is constantly running back and forth between factions, trying to speak out of both sides of its mouth at once. Shame (thoguh not for Obama).

No one likes a loser, but in this case, she's not the loser, McCain is. She's been catapulted into the national stage (way before she was ready or capable), and sure she's figuring that out right now, but in fact the 'base' will always love her. She's not in any trouble with them.  The problem for her is that that 'base' is getting smaller. As thoughtful conservatives remember that competence is actually important, that fiscal restraint is a touchstone, that Reagan won not with the Christian base, but with the people fed up with the economic and social liberalism that people percieved the country to be going through, and the percieved resulting tax and job impact average folks were feeling.  But despite a few words in that direction, Palin doesn't have the intellectual background to address those conservatives. So she's firing up the dwindling base. She would be right to separate herself carefully from the campaign, but if she really wants to have an impact, her off message moments shoudl be directed toward the other, thoughtful conservatives. However, she can't really address them with absolutely no background or record in that regard....so Palin/Plumber 2012 will have to find a way to keep them from becoming indies.  Realistically though, and scary thought, Palin has 8 yeras to figure this out, and would probably be wise NOT to run in 2012, but instead to burnish credentials elsewhere.

Off-message is the way to go for the McCain folks now. What does it say that Sarah Palin is now schooling Steve Schmidt in campaign tactics?

I agree with ryan and CFK -- if McCain had run the kind of campaign that many thought he would run last fall, and had shown he was willing to risk losing the evangelical base (who weren't going to go for Obama, no matter what) to win a huge chunk of the center and Reagan Dems, he might be looking at pocketing the election now.  If he had chosen -- yeah, even Lieberman or Romney -- but maybe someone like Kay Bailey Hutchinson as running mate, he would be looking very good now.  His argument that he's not Bush would have somewhat more conviction, rather than being just pathetic as it is now.  The series of wrong decisions makes me wonder just who has been in charge at the top of the McCain organization -- it's like that one of those stories where someone fails to go with their instincts in favor of "rational" decision-making and thereby embraces disaster.  The joke is, McCain's image of erratic and idiosyncratic behavior might not have come so much into discussion had he made idiosyncratic decisions more in tune with himself and less in tune with the campaign handlers.

Echoing ironyroad, in the end McCain positioned himself all wrong. He lost the independents and moderate, Reagan Democrats who once loved him and had to rebuild his base from scratch with the far right wing of the GOP, which never trusted him. He had a shot at the White House if he'd stayed true to himself. Instead he was too clever by half.

She's a rat leaving a ship she helped sink. That's all.

The obvious fact that she helped sink it doesn't trouble her unfurrowed brow, because unpleasant facts never do. The fact that such a mentality has got her this far in life is a testament to something. Something very bad about our culture, or human nature.