I'm about to board my flight back to the Bay Area, so for now take a look at this:

Now it's important to note that Chuck Todd is right -- live by the Gallup tracking poll, die by it. These things, perhaps even more than other polls, are snapshots in time rather than predictions of the future. That said, it's never bad to see a 10-point net shift over three days.

Anyway, for now consider this an open thread... What's on your mind?

With the trial of Ted Stevens beginning next month, and a verdict likely in the case before election day, what happens to the Republican presidential ticket if and when the case comes to a close in mid- or late-October.

There was an extent to which John McCain had an opportunity to deflect criticism over the trial of Stevens, the longest serving Republican Senator in history, given the fact that the two haven't tended to be particularly close on Capitol Hill. However, by picking Sarah Palin, McCain is wholeheartedly embracing the Stevens machine, which is in tatters in Alaska following not only the indictment of the senior Senator but also the cases against and investigations into state legislators close to him (including his son Ben Stevens, the former President of the state Senate). Take a look, for instance, at the ad Stevens cut for Palin at a key point in her nascent general election campaign in 2006:

But it's not just the case that Stevens has been a key supporter of Palin, helping her move up from the mayor of a town with a population of less than 10,000 residents to become Governor. Palin has also been a key ally of Stevens -- even after it was well known that he was under federal investigation. Here's the two of them campaigning together just last month, for instance:

With Palin so closely aligned with Stevens -- and under an ethics investigation herself -- what happens if and when a verdict in the Stevens trial comes down, say, on October 20th, roughly two weeks from election day? What if it comes down on the Thursday before election day? I'm not sure we know the exact answer -- but I've got a feeling that such an outcome wouldn't be a great one for the McCain campaign.

Update [2008-8-29 14:20:13 by Jonathan Singer]: Don't think the McCain campaign is worried about Palin's ties to Stevens? Then why was the ad above featuring Stevens stumping and vouching for Palin mysteriously scrubbed from Palin's website? (Nice catch, TPM!)

I spent last night listening to one of the greatest political events that I believe has ever happened. Being there while Obama gave his historic speech was a blast, and it was a speech that was everything a strong Democrat could want. Obama clearly is fighting to win this election, like I hoped he would.

Today, McCain chooses Palin in a pick that is a political earthquake. Her speech was done quite well, and she adds a ton McCain's chances. In some ways, she's Obama's worst fears, as she energizes the GOP base in a way like no other pick could have done. Their base is going to be fired up.

My guess is that Obama's bump is going to continue for today, but beyond that, who knows. The last thing we needed was a chance for the Republican Party to re-brand itself around reform and change. There's little doubt that Palin is inexperienced, but how that comes across depends on how she handles herself with the media.

I gotta get out of Denver, great place to be for the week, but time to get back to work in electing Democratic Senators.

Make no mistake, Palin is a gamechanger pick for McCain. She, along with Whitman, was one of the two potential candidates that I thought had this potential for McCain. No one on the Democratic side saw this coming. I saw plenty of support for Palin in the rightwing blogosphere over the past few months. In fact, whenever there was a poll, she would win going away. Is she Quayle-like, or not ready? Its all going to play out here in the next few hours as she speaks, coming up in 15 minutes. That will be the impact, not all the chatter around the pick.

But you know, this is a really good pick for our nation. The Republican party has now opened itself up to having a women on the ticket for the first time in history. Palin is wrong on nearly everything in her policies, but its another powerful breakthrough for the political system.

It has been forty years since someone as inexperienced as Sarah Palin has been put on a national ticket, and surprisingly enough there are some real similarities between Palin and her unprepared predecessor, Spiro T. Agnew, who also had been governor less than two years at the time Richard Nixon picked him to be his number two and who also had a corruption problem lingering in the background that would end up causing his running mate problems.

Prior to being sworn in as the Governor of Alaska a mere 19 months ago, Palin served as the mayor and a city councilor of the small city of Wasilla, which according to 2005 census estimates had a population of 8,471. This hardly rounds out the type of resume traditionally seen in vice presidential candidates -- and indeed is one of the two thinnest resumes of any major party vice presidential nominee since 1936, the only other nominee to match her level of inexperience being Agnew, who had also only served two years as Governor (though of the significantly larger state of Maryland) by the time he was sworn in as Vice President in January 1969.

But the comparisons between Palin and Agnew do not end there. Just as a corruption scandal from Agnew's time as Maryland Governor plagued him throughout his Vice Presidential tenure -- in the end forcing him to resign -- so too does Palin have a corruption problem brewing in the background. What's more, her corruption and abuse of power problem is one easily understood by voters: She allegedly attempted to have fired a state trooper in a custody battle with her sister.

Gov. Sarah Palin on Wednesday revealed an audio recording that shows an aide pressuring the Public Safety Department to fire a state trooper embroiled in a custody battle with her sister.

Palin, who has previously said her administration didn't exert pressure to get rid of trooper Mike Wooten, also disclosed that members of her staff had made about two dozen contacts with public safety officials about the trooper.

[...]

But Palin said her decision to fire Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan last month had nothing to do with his refusal to dump trooper Mike Wooten.

The governor said evidence of what she called a "smoking gun" conversation, and other calls made by her aides, only recently surfaced as the attorney general started an inquiry at her request into the circumstances surrounding her firing of Monegan. Palin wanted the review because a special investigator hired by the Legislature is about to investigate the firing and a legislator has been quoted in a newspaper story talking about impeachment.

The majority of the calls came from Palin's chief of staff at the time, Mike Tibbles, according to information gathered by the state attorney general's office. Attorney General Talis Colberg and Palin's husband, Todd, also contacted Monegan about the trooper.

Do we really need to put another wildly inexperienced, purely political choice into the White House, only to see issues from that candidate's past potentially stain the Vice Presidency?

The buzz at the airport is that Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska is McCain's VP pick. And by 'buzz' I mean I heard it from a guy who said Romney and Pawlenty are out, which NBC News is reporting.

Pawlenty has been told he won't be chosen by McCain, according to NBC's David Gregory. And Romney won't be at today's Dayton, Ohio, rally with McCain, NBC's Chuck Todd reported. Romney spent Thursday courting donors in California.

He said that someone in the media tracked Palin's plane and confirmed she would be at the rally today.

Update [2008-8-29 10:39:14 by Todd Beeton]:It's confirmed, it's Palin.

Update [2008-8-29 10:48:38 by Todd Beeton]:TPM:

CNN is reporting that a "senior campaign source" confirmed McCain's pick of the Alaska governor.

Update [2008-8-29 10:48:38 by Todd Beeton]:First thoughts: this is an entirely reactionary pick. Palin is to McCain what Biden is to Obama. Putting it in simplistic terms, if Biden brought experience to Obama's change, Palin brings change to McCain's experience. She also brings youth to his age and, of course, she's a she, which McCain cynically thinks will help him with disaffected Hillary supporters who might be itching to vote for a woman.

Update [2008-8-29 11:16:57 by Todd Beeton]:McCain likes to say that the VP's only job is to inquire as to the health of the president every day. In other words, replace the president if anything were to happen. So by definition, John McCain, by picking Palin, is saying that SHE is "ready to lead." This is someone who's been governor half the time Obama's been in the US Senate. So if Palin's ready to lead, then Obama must be twice as ready. Sort of undermines his argument against Obama, doesn't it? This could be sort of a disaster.

What's the media's take? I'm about to get on a plane so discuss amongst yourselves and I'm sure the other guys will jump in.

I just got back to the 'puter from Invesco, and won't bother summing that WOW experience up, you were 'there' and know what I mean.

Who is McCain's VP?  Teasers all day about an out-of-box pick like Lieberman, then Hutchinson, and then Meg Whitman. You have to say that the McCain spin around his VP pick has played the given landscape well.

But then, he winds up picking Pawlenty or Romney, so what exactly is gained?  Here's my view, if it's one of these two (first though, a longshot chance that its Portman or Thune, and even more minor than Pawlenty) and what it means.

Pawlenty is a legacy choice almost. ie, McCain choosing his successor in 2012 to run against a President Obama. He doesn't want to choose Romney, and then lose, to find himself having a Kerry-like experience (ala Edwards). If he chooses Pawlenty, I almost feel like he sees the writing on the wall. There is a small chance that it works (something around running against DC under the 'reform' mantle), but its outside the realm of the likely.

Romney is a sign that McCain wants to win. That pick excites the base of the GOP that works. Its who their activists, the ones that show up to shout, want. McCain has never gotten along with that part of the GOP, but Romney does. In some ways, the Romney pick for McCain is like the Clinton choice for Obama. The medicine to win that neither wanted to take. Obama has the luxury, given the generic D over R lead, of opting out and still being in postion to win. McCain probably does not, especially for going with just another traditional pick like Pawlenty instead.

I've thought Pawlenty all week, but Ambinder is reporting that Romney could be Dayton this morning. You will know in a few hours and talk about it here... I'll be sleeping in in Denver.

It's almost been too easy for Democrats to take rhetorical shortcuts this cycle: just ride out the recent anti-Republican momentum without doing the work to explain how the culpability for the governing failure of the last eight years lies with long-standing Republican philosophy.

Bill Clinton picked up the charge yesterday. And today, so did Obama:

For over two decades, he's subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy - give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.  In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is - you're on your own.  Out of work?  Tough luck.  No health care?  The market will fix it.  Born into poverty?  Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps - even if you don't have boots.  You're on your own.

Well it's time for them to own their failure.  It's time for us to change America.

You see, we Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country.

We measure progress by how many people can find a job that pays the mortgage; whether you can put a little extra money away at the end of each month so you can someday watch your child receive her college diploma.  We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was President - when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of down $2,000 like it has under George Bush.

We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job - an economy that honors the dignity of work.

The fundamentals we use to measure economic strength are whether we are living up to that fundamental promise that has made this country great - a promise that is the only reason I am standing here tonight.

This is a crucial turn for Obama - specifically assigning partisan blame for the economic and foreign policy disasters of the last eight years. With millions of new voters coming into our political process for the first time, it's crucial our leaders make the broader, more durable argument about who should and should not be governing our country.

Update [2008-8-29 4:31:8 by Josh Orton]: Commenter "itsthemedia" pulls the relevant section from Bill Clinton's Wednesday speech, which addresses the point even more specifically:

...[McCain] still embraces the extreme philosophy which has defined his party for more than 25 years, a philosophy we never had a real chance to see in action until 2001, when the Republicans finally gained control of both the White House and Congress. Then we saw what would happen to America if the policies they had talked about for decades were implemented.

They took us from record surpluses to an exploding national debt; from over 22 million new jobs down to 5 million; from an increase in working family incomes of $7,500 to a decline of more than $2,000; from almost 8 million Americans moving out of poverty to more than 5 and a half million falling into poverty - and millions more losing their health insurance.

Now, in spite of all the evidence, their candidate is promising more of the same: More tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that will swell the deficit, increase inequality, and weaken the economy. More band-aids for health care that will enrich insurance companies, impoverish families and increase the number of uninsured. More going it alone in the world, instead of building the shared responsibilities and shared opportunities necessary to advance our security and restore our influence.

They actually want us to reward them for the last eight years by giving them four more. Let's send them a message that will echo from the Rockies all across America: Thanks, but no thanks.