'When Barack's berserkers lost the plot'

.....instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor's office

On the other, liberal journalists turned her family into an object of sexual disgust: inbred rednecks who had stumbled out of Deliverance.
Palin was meant to be pretending that a handicapped baby girl was her child when really it was her wanton teenage daughter's.

When that turned out to be a lie, the media replaced it with prurient coverage of her teenage daughter, who was, after all, pregnant, even though her mother was not going to do a quick handover at the maternity ward and act as if the child was hers

When a hate campaign goes wrong, however, disaster follows. And everything that could go wrong with the campaign against Palin did. American liberals forgot that the public did not know her. By the time she spoke at the Republican convention, journalists had so lowered expectations that a run-of-the-mill speech would have been enough to win the evening.

Journalists who believe in women's equality should not spread sexual smears about a candidate, or snigger at her teenage daughter's pregnancy, or declare that a mother with a young family cannot hold down a responsible job for the pragmatic reason that they will look like gross hypocrites if they do


In an age when politics is choreographed, voters watch out for the moments when the public-relations facade breaks down and venom pours through the cracks.
Their judgment is rarely favourable when it does.
Barack Obama knows it.
All last week, he was warning American liberals to stay away from the Palin family.

He understands better than his supporters that it is not a politician's enemies who lose elections, but his friends.'

Recommended reading from the 'liberal' Observer today