(1)
It sounds like a significant faction of the Republican Party, faced with the McCain-Palin campaign’s dismal prospects on Tuesday, is looking ahead to 2008. And it seems to really like for tomorrow what it sees today.

Whether the Republican presidential ticket wins or loses on Tuesday, a group of prominent conservatives are planning to meet the next day to discuss the way forward, and whatever the outcome, Gov. Sarah Palin will be high on the agenda.

Ms. Palin, of Alaska, has had a rocky time since being named as Senator John McCain’s running mate, but to many conservatives her future remains bright. If Mr. McCain wins, she will give the social conservative movement a seat inside the White House. If he loses, she could emerge as a standard bearer for the movement and a potential presidential candidate in 2012, albeit one who will need to address her considerable political damage.

Her prospects, in or out of government, are the subject of intensive conversations among conservative leaders…
[...]
Despite all the criticism, she has many supporters among Republicans who see her as bright, tough and a star in a party with relatively few on the horizon.

“She’s dynamite,” said Morton C. Blackwell, who was President Ronald Reagan’s liaison to the conservative movement. Mr. Blackwell described vying to get close to Ms. Palin at a fund-raiser in Virginia, lamenting that he could get only within four feet.

… Asked if the weeks of unflattering revelations and damaging interviews had tarnished her among conservatives, he replied, “Not a bit.”

Doesn’t sound like the Republican Party wants to learn the basic lesson of 2008. They ran a bunch of clowns for President. Every single serious candidate for the Republican nomination was a cruel joke on the Republican party. (Rudee Giuliani, for crying out loud! And Freddie Thompson! Mitt Romney! Mike Huckabee!)

Early in the race, every single one of them was looking around at the rest of the field, and going to himself: “I don’t see how any of these clowns can win this nomination. What a pathetic bunch of idiots!” It somehow never occurred to each one that everyone else was looking at him, and making the exact same judgement.

Fittingly enough, the most pathetic idiot in the bunch won the nomination. And ran the most pathetically idiotic presidential campaign in recent history.

And so the response of the conservative wing of the Republican party is to push another pathetic idiot for the 2008 nomination. If Gods are not done being cruel to the Republican party, Palin will win the nomination in 2008. And run an even more idiotically pathetic campaign than McCain 2004.

(2)
It looks like Palin herself has been doing some political calculations in her head:

Ms. Palin’s aides insist that winning this time around is her sole objective. But there are signs that she, too, is making sure that she is well positioned for the future if she and Mr. McCain lose.

In a week that most candidates give over to big rallies and closing arguments, she is giving policy speeches, like one on Wednesday on energy security, a move aides say is intended to help her be seen as more substantive.

On Monday, she held a brief meeting with the Israeli ambassador, reflecting an interest that aides say she expresses in intense foreign policy tutorials. She has increasingly separated herself from Mr. McCain’s positions, and this week tried to quarantine herself from the damage caused by news that the Republican National Committee had spent $150,000 on clothing and accessories for her and her family.

More and more, she has broken out of the cloister imposed early on by McCain aides, doing more interviews with local television stations and newspapers, and speaking off the cuff to reporters who travel with her.

The McCain campaign, though, (at this late stage in the race, I want to offer an elegant abbreviation for “McCain campaign”: McCaign) wants to make sure that — in the best naval tradition — Palin goes down with the ship. Evidently, they think this is only proper and fitting, since they regard her as the torpedo that brought down the ship. So now senior McCaign aides are starting to freely confirm to reporters our worst suspicions about what an empty piece of fluff Sarah Palin is:

I’m sympathetic to Eskew and Wallace (Palin’s handlers from the McCain campaign), and not just because they’re decent people. They’ve held their tongue from leaking what a couple of McCain higher-ups have told me—namely, that Palin simply knew nothing about national and international issues. Which meant, as one such adviser said to me: “Letting Sarah be Sarah may not be such a good thing.” It’s a grim binary choice, but apparently it came down to whether to make Palin look like a scripted robot or an unscripted ignoramus.

And at this point, McCaign is not pulling its punches. It was bad enough when they labeled her a self-centered diva:

“She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone,” said this McCain adviser. “She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else.

“Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.”

But they went one better than that:

In convo with Playbook, a top McCain adviser one-ups the priceless “diva” description, calling her “a whack job.”

And there’s still a few days of name-calling left before election day. Not to mention the lively postmortem that’s bound to follow.