Ta-Nehisi Coates has a long and thoughtful post on Sarah Palin (hat tip Andrew Sullivan). She starts by saying:
I’ve been thinking a lot about this nomination and rewatching the videos of Palin’s interview. Honestly, it’s all made me tremendously sad. There are lot of us lefties who are guffawing right now and are happy to see Palin seemingly stumbling drunkenly from occasional interview to occasional interview. I may have been one of them. But I’m out of that group now.
I’m afraid I’m still in that group. But only because the alternative is, to me, truly frightening. Palin could well be a heartbeat away from the presidency in four short months. So what may appear as guffawing really has an element of desperation underneath. We need to find if the biggest issues with Sarah Palin are her (to me objectionable) policies on women’s rights and the environment (among others) or whether she has been put in the position of being a real life King Ralph.
Coates also writes (emphasis mine):
My point is that, Sarah Palin never struck me as stupid. When she talked about not backpacking across Europe and working her whole life, beneath the dumb anti-intellectual dig, I saw a gem of truth. I wish she had have mined it, instead of trying to score a cheap point. Rambling aside, she simply isn’t ready. Maybe she would be eight years from now, but she isn’t ready now, any campaign worth its salt would have known this.
In election season, there is a price for being turned into a symbol. When actual journalists, with a rep to protect, show up, they are going to do their job. Which brings me to the sexism of John McCain. He knew full well what Sarah Palin was going to face if he nominated her. He knew that reporters would go through her past, that they’d quizz her on the present, that she would need to be ready, and he shunted concern aside, and tossed her to the wolves. Think on that for a mement. For one last run at the White House, he risked a future star of the party he claims to call home. How do you do that? I don’t meant to rob Palin of agency, certainly she is also a victim of her own calculations and ambitions. But where I am from the elders protect you, and pull you back when you’ve gone too far, when your head has gotten too big.
I agree. I think Sarah Palin is smart, and I bet she is a quick study. But I remember what Paul Sagan, an editor of Time, said about info overload:
No one wants to sit at the bottom of Niagara Falls with a bucket, saying “I can’t keep up with all this.”
Palin is at the bottom of the falls with an eye dropper. And there’s more at risk than the election on November 4th … I twittered this AM that the conservative editor of the National Review noted that Palin’s lack of preparation for the national stage “risks damaging her political brand forevermore.”
That could be a hefty price to pay for a Hail Mary pass.
Update. Fareed Zakaria agrees:
Can we now admit the obvious? Sarah Palin is utterly unqualified to be vice president. She is a feisty, charismatic politician who has done some good things in Alaska. But she has never spent a day thinking about any important national or international issue, and this is a hell of a time to start.
Conservative David Brooks said essentially the same thing on Chris Matthews’ show today. But Zakaria goes it one more:
In these times, for John McCain to have chosen this person to be his running mate is fundamentally irresponsible. McCain says that he always puts country first. In this important case, it is simply not true.
Of course, she’s still drawing in the crowds at her appearances, so all this may actually not matter. Perish the thought.
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Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our modern culture -- especially diet. Beth writes about ancestral health, health policy, & mindfulness. And cats! 
