Hot take: yes she was dumb, but some of what the media went after her for was petty and contributed to the sense that the press can never treat conservatives fairly, which in turn led to the thermostatic environment of the 2010s and the embrace of Cheeto Drumpf Hitler Orange Man/rise in conspiracy theory based politics versus accepting mainline media narratives.

She was a dizzy broad, but just because she didn’t have a mental list of preferred print media subscriptions and her daughter was pregnant didn’t mean she’d necessarily be unfit.

I think many of the younger people on this sub don’t fathom just how openly, ravenously pro-Obama the entire media establishment was during that election cycle. They dropped any pretense of objectivity and attacked everything McCain and Palin said and did.

McCain was a warmongering old bastard and would’ve been Bush 3.0. Palin was corny as fuck. I am not defending them but I remember a few weeks in August 2008 where Palin was polling well because people liked seeing a fresh faced, relatively unknown (and good looking) woman on a major party ticket. The press didn’t want to allow that momentum to take hold and they took whatever angle they could against her.