Palin continues to lift McCain

Well, this is getting serious. What can explain Palin power? Victor Davis Hanson has a thoughtful essay on the subject. A few quotes:

Most of you ... seem to think that a fumbling nervous Obama in interviews, who grasps for a word and utters vacuous platitudes is “really” contemplative, like his Harvard Law professors; but when a Sarah Palin seems nervous under scrutiny from a pseudo-professorial, glasses-on-the-lower-nose Charlie Gibson, she is clearly an empty head with an Idaho BA.

I think it is much harder for a mother of three or four in an out-of-the-way Alaskan town to get elected to city council and the mayorship, then take on the entire Republican establishment and get elected governor than it is for a Barack Obama to emerge from Chicago politics into the Illinois state house and later Senate. The qualities that allowed a Palin to succeed without the power spouse, the identity politics, the Ivy-League cachet, the fawning New York editors and DC insider-press will ensure she does not implode on the campaign trail—and won’t in office either.

More impressively, "thousands of Floridians lined up to see Sarah Palin today in Florida. 60,000 people showed up to see Governor Palin in a community of about 75,000." See the rest here. She's clearly tapped into some force that Obama seems to have left behind.

Update: take this chart with several grains of salt—today's figures (9/22) reversed the probabilities dramatically, with Obama at 57% and McCain at 41%. Not sure how or why to explain the sudden shift.