It came down to whether to make Palin look like a scripted robot or an unscripted ignoramus.

[Are_grits_groceries]

Palin, Alone Aboard the Bus

Almost from the very beginning, the Palin pick created tension.
An armada of handlers descended on McCain’s running mate like the flying monkeys in The Wizard Of Oz. The day after the ticket made its debut, it was August 30 and the campaign staged a rally outside of Pittsburgh, on the field of a minor league baseball team called the Washington Wild Things. I remember seeing Tucker Eskew—an old Bush hand out of South Carolina who had never spent a day in McCain World until Nicolle Wallace recruited him to be Palin’s counselor—wandering around the premises, looking somewhat lost. He and Wallace took charge of schooling the Alaska governor on message discipline. Two days later at the GOP convention, an adviser watched them coach Palin on how to answer routine press questions and warned Steve Schmidt that she was being overly managed. Three weeks later, Wallace arranged for the interview with her former CBS colleague Katie Couric, which proved to be a disaster. Meanwhile, Palin’s debate prep was going miserably, to the point where Schmidt had to peel off from McCain (who was having his own challenges responding to the financial crisis) and join Nicolle’s husband Mark Wallace in simplifying Palin’s prep so as to avert catastrophe. The latter efforts resulted in what one senior adviser would describe to me with palpable relief as “a campaign-saving performance.”

http://men.style.com/gq/blogs/gqeditors/2008/10/palin-alone-abo.html

I think they ended up with both.

[Blue_In_AK]

1. McCain has no one to blame but himself.

If he had vetted her at all here, he would have known that she CAN be a trouble-maker. He should have talked to Randy Ruedrich and Frank Murkowski and Greg Renkes and all the other Republicans that she's stomped on to get to where she is now. What made him think he'd be any different?

[Solly Mack]

2. Gigo Palin

[Orsino]

3. "Campaign-saving performance"...

...in the sense that the final humiliation was put off until November.