Incisive article from the UK left The Guardian today Web Link
"My colleagues in the American liberal press had little to fear at the start of the week.
Their charismatic candidate was ahead in virtually every poll.
George W Bush was so unpopular that conservatives were scrambling around for reasons not to invite the Republican President to the Republican convention.
Democrats had only to maintain their composure and the White House would be theirs....But instead of protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.
But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk.
On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object.
The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor's office.
On the other, liberal journalists turned her family into an object of sexual disgust: inbred rednecks who had stumbled out of Deliverance
When a hate campaign goes wrong, however, disaster follows.
And everything that could go wrong with the campaign against Palin did."
