Clive Crook puts it rather well for the Financial Times: ‘If Barack Obama loses this election to John McCain – something which, for the first time, I regard as a real possibility – history will point to August 29 as the pivotal moment. That was when Mr McCain announced that Sarah Palin would be his running-mate, and when livid Democrats and their friends in the media voiced their feelings about her and much of the electorate, and gravely harmed their candidate’s prospects.’
Barack Obama and his supporters in the blogosphere and media have done a tremendous disservice to themselves and their cause by going after Palin with such passion and even aggression. They have clearly shown the world their bias, their lies, their distortions and, above all, their utterly dishonest hate. The opposition to Palin is not rational, it is emotional. It’s not well-considered, it’s ill-considered. It’s not political, it is personal.

And Obama’s campaign has lost all sense of a possible moral highground it may once have had.

It has fallen so low that no one, except for his supporters in the blogosphere and media of course, can take his claim of being a different kind of politician, who will bring hope and change serious. Not one undecided voter can look at this man and think ‘he’s different!‘

He’s not, and his campaign and supporters have made that clear in recent weeks. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions tell everyone that they are not just not ‘different,’ but possibly worse.

They stopped presenting a positive image of Obama and, instead, went all negative, all the time. Such an approach may seem worthwhile to those who are emotionally vested in the campaign, and who passionately hate Palin and that which she stands for, but to the rest of the world, the attacks do not result in people thinking less of Palin. No, the negativity causes people – and I have noticed this here in the Netherlands – to think much less of Obama. Especially women I talked to in order to get an impression of what Dutch citizens think about the U.S. campaign have responded angrily to his campaign’s attacks on Palin. They consider them dishonorable and not worthy of a president.

And I’m talking about the Netherlands here; a country in which Obama once had a large, comfortable lead, and was considered to truly be a man of hope and change – according to the polls.