James Fallows writes, “Try to think back to when sophisticated people thought that Sarah Palin was the key to Republican victory.”
All I can say is, Fallows wasn’t hanging out with the right sort of sophisticates!
Overall, Fallows’s article seems fine to me; I was just struck by that offhand remark about Palin. I have no doubt that Fallows knew sophisticated people who thought that Palin was the key to Republican victory, but there’s no way that these were political scientists. The sophisticated political scientists knew better. Don’t get me wrong—there’s lots of stuff we are naive about, but this sort of thing, we have a pretty good understanding of.