And so when Lieberman was nixed at the last minute by state party chairmen and their allies, we had the specter of Rick Davis actually scrambling through Google to find a woman - any woman - who could complement McCain. The sexism was due to Davis' and Schmidt's and McCain's bizarre notion that alienated Clinton primary voters would flock to a cranky old pro-lifer as long as someone with estrogen was his Number Two. The sheer distance from reality this implies and the identity politics it represents found its natural apotheosis in Palin: also detached from reality, and also an identity politics candidate - but not for women, as it turned out, but for the white Christianist far-right. And so McCain triggered a rebirth of the old GOP more akin to the party before Buckley - with racists, extremists and religious nuts defining the party's base, as they still do.

This was a farce; a joke; a disaster. Palin had no notion of basic high school history. She barely understood what the Cold War was.

She didn't know what the Federal Reserve did. She believed that her First Amendment rights meant she was protected from press inquiries. She couldn't tell you why there's a North and a South Korea. And she had an inability to distinguish between her own view of the world - which always rationalized everything that Sarah Palin did - and reality. This discovery then led to the elaborate and panicked strategy of shielding Palin from any direct press scrutiny - she held zero open press conferences in the campaign - and the desperate attempts to cram as much into her brain before the one-on-one media interviews and the veep debate. She also, as Schmidt details, had a capacity for saying things that were demonstrably untrue, even repeating them forcefully after the world had moved on. The Dish chronicled this bizarre record as it unfolded, but the more we found out about her, the loopier she seemed.

Inside, we now know, it became clear to many McCain aides that it was simply irresponsible to allow her to assume the office of vice-presidency. Their patriotism eventually came to the fore, as they contemplated the horror of this total novice and ignoramus - however sexy and eager to learn - actually running the United States. The responsible thing to have done, of course, would have been to have taken her off the ticket early on. But that, of course, would have destroyed what was left of McCain's chances. For a presidential candidate to concede that his first significant presidential decision had been a total fiasco would be to concede that he shouldn't be president. And indeed, McCain shouldn't have been president. In fact, he should in my view resign from the Senate because his conduct of the last campaign revealed that he put narrow partisan interests ahead of core patriotic ones. He was prepared to allow someone to replace him as president who, his own staff believed, could be "mentally unstable."