Most politicians of prominence write a book. My honest view is that she would not be a winning candidate for president and if she was the results would be … catastrophic. It’s fairly inconceivable she could be elected.

Did McCain boost Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) a little by backing him for a Senate race he was probably going to enter anyway? Sure. But the politician that McCain lifted from obscurity to national power was Sarah Palin, and the party is going to wrestle with that for years.

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Scheunemann, confirming that his e-mail had been searched, accused Schmidt of “acting in a manner of Iranian secret police” in going to his account.

Fourteen paragraphs later — this is a war of inches! — comes this:

“So after that, they went nuclear with ‘diva’ the next day,” Scheunemann said, referring to the Palin-bashing done to CNN’s Dana Bash the day after the POLITICO story. “But did anybody search Mark or Nicolle Wallace’s e-mails for leaks to Dana Bash?”

I hope for Scheuemann’s sake that he’s actually complaining about a double standard, as the alternative explanation is too awful a crime against self-awareness, but in either case, I just don’t know how these guys lost the election.

This window into the campaign’s inner workings — how it reached the decision to “suspend the campaign” to deal with the financial crisis — is worth meditating on:

[McCain campaign strategist Steve] Schmidt in particular was a believer in these kinds of defining moments. The smartest bit of political wisdom he ever heard was dispensed by George W. Bush one spring day at the White House residence in 2004, at a time when his re-election effort was not going especially well. The strategists at the meeting — including Schmidt, who was directing the Bush campaign’s rapid-response unit — fretted over their candidate’s sagging approval ratings and the grim headlines about the war in Iraq. Only Bush appeared thoroughly unworried. He explained to them why, polls notwithstanding, voters would ultimately prefer him over his opponent, John Kerry.

There’s an accidental genius to the way Americans pick a president, Schmidt remembers Bush saying that day. By the end of it all, a candidate’s true character is revealed to the American people.

If Sen. John McCain loses next month, Draper has already explained why. If he somehow manages to pull it out, this piece will be studied for clues as to how McCain did it.

And National Review’s Rich Lowry reports that he “talked to two people in McCain world the last few days who call the whole thing ‘disgraceful’” — so you know it’s got to be good.

Gov. Sarah Palin can’t seem to finish a rally without riffing on her (rare) interactions with the “mainstream media.”

Since the conventions, the Obama campaign has consistently hammered reporters for how they cover McCain’s falsehoods.

The styles are different, but the target and goals are the same.

Lately, McCain attack dog Steve Schmidt has been blasting entire news organizations for being “in the tank” for Obama — the standard Shoot The Messenger ploy.

Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan, on the other hand, has nominated himself as a roving fact checker for thinly sourced GOP attacks. On Monday morning, he released an “Obama-Biden memo” casting the Ayers smear as a fundamental test for how the media covers lies.

The message from Obama to the reporters traveling with him is a reverse George Costanza: “It’s not me, it’s you.”

“Notwithstanding the facts, we fully expect an increasingly frustrated and desperate McCain campaign to continue to lie in attacking Senator Obama,” reads the memo to the reporters. “However, the question remains – will McCain and his allies be challenged by the press on their lies or will they be allowed to propagate them with impunity” (emphasis added).

See, it’s not about Obama at all, it’s about whether the media does their job.  The memo ends with “a list of the most common lies the McCain campaign tells about Ayers and the actual facts that prove them false.”

Obama’s aides are right on this one.  There is no “issue” or “question” about Ayers and Obama.

Palin was lying when she said Ayers and Obama palled around. Major investigative reports found nothing here, so when reporters still cover a casual acquaintanceship with lurid overtones of guilt by association, they don’t just spread the politics of neo-McCarthyism, they empower it.

Tom Brokaw got in that mud yesterday. Apparently, he could not stomach the farce that Ayers is a substantive issue in the presidential campaign, so he took the “strategic” cop-out, asking whether Obama was making a political error by not “get[ing] at” the topic earlier and describing the Ayers attacks as “below the radar.”

I don’t know what radar Brokaw is using, but Ayers was a huge issue in the primary. Obama even “got at” it during a nationally televised debate. Slicing through the absurd charge that he is connected to Ayers’ checkered past, Obama noted that he was a child during Ayers’ criminal period.

By turning this tawdry topic into armchair quarterbacking for the Democratic ticket — “We know this is bull, but is Obama rebutting it adroitly?” — Brokaw unintentionally revealed the irresponsible vapidity of such questions.

It’s no wonder the Obama campaign is hammering the media this week. You can almost see the Illinois senator parrying one of these questions when Brokaw moderates Tuesday’s debate.  “It’s not me, Tom, it’s you.”

Palin says she wishes the McCain campaign hadn’t made the decision to pull its staff and resources out of Michigan.

“Well, it’s not a surprise, because the polls show we’re not doing as well there, evidently, as we would like to. But, I read that this morning, also, I fired off a quick email, and said, ‘Oh, come on. Do we have to call it there?’

“Todd and I, we’d be happy to get to Michigan and walk through those plants of the car manufacturers. We’d be so happy to speak with the people there in Michigan, who are hurting because the economy is hurting…I want to get back to Michigan, and I want to try.”

It’s worth noting that Palin appears much more comfortable in this interview than she was with Katie Couric. However, Palin’s comment raises a number of intriguing questions.

First, she read about the pullout this morning?

The story was being reported yesterday afternoon. Nobody from the campaign shared this with her yesterday?

Granted, she spent the bulk of the day preparing for the debate with Sen. Joe Biden. But the decision to cede one of the largest battleground states to the opponent with just over a month left till the election is one of the biggest the campaign can make. If she was neither consulted nor even told of the decision yesterday, does this indicate that she is not privy to any of the internal discussions within the campaign?

I’m not saying she should be arguing with Steve Schmidt over tactics. But is she not even consulted for her opinion about how she can contribute to the campaign’s overall strategy? Does she have any role other than appearing at rallies and spewing talking points? Would this role change in a McCain-Palin administration?

In other news, Cameron promised that Palin will finally answer the question of what she reads in a forthcoming segment. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Here’s the video, thanks to TPM:

“Shame on them,” he thundered, striving for the higher ground against the campaign of Hope. “Shame on them!” he repeated, ticking off attacks by the Obama camp that he decried as “absolutely untrue,” and blasting Obama as the gutless loser of the first debate. Obama agreed with McCain “11 times,” Schmidt said, which revealed a defensive posture.

Greg Craig, an Obama adviser who played the role of McCain during the campaign’s debate prep, countered Schmidt from another corner of the room. Craid said that while Obama was confident enough to note where the candidates agreed, such as in assessing the Russian conflict, the “fundamental” disagreements on Middle East policy and the economy will settle the election. “I’d stack those [issues] up against 11 agreements,” he added.

Madeline Albright, secretary of state in the Clinton administration, picked up that theme, telling me that she had personal conversations with former Sec. of State Henry A. Kissinger about engaging Iran at the highest diplomatic levels — which supported Obama’s account during the debate.

While the issues are important, the scene was surreal. The surrogates stood, flanked by operatives hoisting bright oversized campaign signs (Schmidt! Craig!) to draw in reporters, who then transmit all barbs back and forth.

As this ritual played out inside, Obama jovially boarded his campaign bus and fist-bumped an aide, according to a pool report. A TV inside the bus was tuned to CNN, as pundits parsed the debate, and Obama watched the scene unfolding back inside the Spin Room as his bus took him back to his hotel in Memphis.

First, a liberal YouTuber mocks the tone from Steve Schmidt, the angry former Bush aide that has turned McCain’s operation into the slashing, lying, anti-press operation on display this week.

After the video, I’m excerpting the Obama campaign’s official rebuttal to Schmidt’s attack on The New York Times, which includes some data that the liberal media complainers should really think through.

The Obama response, “On the McCain campaign’s laughable screed about coverage in The NY Times,” offered this comparison, followed by a cascade of links detailing the past scrutiny of Obama:

By the numbers…

# of probing stories The NY Times has written over the course of the campaign about Barack Obama, his life, his religion, his childhood, his politics, his time in the state senate, his time in the U.S. Senate, his family, his religion, his friends, his fund-raising and all other manner of associations: more than 40 (see below)

# of stories The NY Times has written over the course of the campaign about the last major financial regulatory crisis, resulting in a huge bailout and which John McCain was centrally involved in with his political godfather Charles Keating: 0 (emphasis added)

The numbers show that The Times has scrutinized Obama a lot, along with a broadcast media that has looked into his past and devoted a great deal of time to his preacher, his old friends and even smears that have been completely debunked. For some reason, the press has shied away from putting McCain’s past under the same microscope, and most of the media was late to directly report that the McCain campaign currently uses falsehoods and lies on a regular basis in its speeches, ads and official materials.

So I’m guessing yeah, this is one of those times where Obama can say “this is a debate I’m ready to have.”

Without denying the veracity of The Times’ story, Schmidt lashed out today at the journalistic integrity of the newspaper and it’s alleged bias in favor of Sen. Barack Obama, during a 45-minute conference call with what seemed to be just about every political reporter in Washington.

“We are first amendment absolutists on this campaign, in that the press, and anybody who wishes to cover this race, from the blogosphere perspective or a media perspective, of course is constitutionally-protected with regard to writing whatever they want to write.

But let’s be clear and be honest with each other about something fundamental to this race, which is this: whatever The New York Times once was, it is today not, by any standard, a journalistic organization. It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization that every day attacks the McCain campaign, attacks Sen. McCain, attacks Gov. Palin and excuses Sen. Obama. There’s no level of public vetting with regard to Sen. Obama’s record, his background, his past statements. There’s no level of outrage directed at his deceitful ads.

This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate, which is their prerogative to be. But let’s not be dishonest, and call it something other than what it is. Everything that is read in The New York Times that attacks this campaign should be evaluated by the American people from that perspective: that it is an organization that has made a decision to cast aside its journalistic integrity and tradition, to advocate for the defeat of one candidate — in this case, John McCain — and advocate for the election of the other candidate, Barack Obama.”

Davis got two questions about his ties to the Homeownership Alliance, the group that was the focus of The Times’ piece. Both times, Schmidt changed the subject to a critique of The Times and the news media in general.

Schmidt also blasted reporters for not pursuing the Obama campaign’s questionable connections as aggressively as it had McCain’s. Schmidt specifically cited Sen. Joseph Biden’s son, whom Schmidt referred to as a lobbyist on behalf of the credit card and banking industry (Marc Ambinder notes The Times has published two articles on Biden’s son); Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod’s lobbying activities, and Obama’s relationship to former Weatherman William Ayers.

Schmidt alleged the existence of a “fierce campaign of intimidation” against Obama critics.

“The reality is this: you may not read it on the front page of The New York Times, but the Obama campaign is surrounded by people who have worked in the lobbying industry, and he has been able to make these charges for months with no scrutiny about the reality of his record, and the reality of the records of the people around him. We would hope that in the final 43 days of this campaign, there is a restoration to some degree of the level of symmetry in coverage on these type of issues, because the American people deserve no less.”

While reporters were looking for quotes to follow up on The Times’ article — following a string of ads released by the McCain campaign hitting Obama for his campaign’s ties to Fannie Mae –  Schmidt appeared to have pretty successfully deflected questions about Davis’ own connections to the current financial crisis by engaging in the classic now standard conservative pasttime of bashing The New York Times.