Phil Whiners Gramm and the Vetting of Sarah Palin

Bloomberg reports that Phil Gramm is still at it:

If you’re sitting here today, you’re not economically illiterate and you’re not a whiner, so I’m not worried about who you’re going to vote for,” the former Texas senator told attendees at a Financial Services Roundtable event in Minneapolis on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention.

Team Obama responds:

The man who wrote John McCain’s economic plan further insulted struggling Americans by suggesting that if they are not attending the Republican Convention, they are not only whiners, but economically illiterate.

Guess what else Gramm helped John McCain with:

At today’s event, Gramm also defended McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his vice presidential running mate. “We went through a process of vetting all possible candidates,” narrowing it down to three before choosing Palin, he said.

There was a vetting process? Really? The word is out – this vetting process was about as sloppy as anything I’ve ever seen. The issue for many of us is not how unqualified Sarah Palin is to be Vice President. The issue is the lack of judgment of John McCain – as exemplified by his selection of a running mate he knew very little about. But let me turn the microphone over to Brad DeLong:

There has been a lot of chatter about how the Palin decision shows the unfitness of John McCain. It equally shows the unfitness of McCain’s staff. When you have a rash and impulsive boss, you compensate by staff work. You examine the leaves of the strategy tree in advance, knowing that nine times out of ten the work will be unnecessary–but the tenth time it will be very necessary indeed. John McCain’s staff did not do that.

Update: Joshua Green describes the Eagleton Scenario:

Barring a dramatic reversal, Sarah Palin will formally become the Republican vice presidential nominee Wednesday night. Since Friday, when the pick was announced, news surrounding Palin has been almost uniformly negative: the initial focus on her lack of experience quickly gave way to reports of her involvement in the Troopergate scandal, the “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark, an Alaskan separatist party, a 527 group organized by recently indicted Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, and, on Labor Day, her teenage daughter’s pregnancy … With reporters and opposition researchers crawling through Alaska, and with the McCain campaign having dispatched its own team of lawyers to re-vet Palin, Republicans are wondering what shoe might drop next. If further revelations prove damaging enough, McCain could decide to replace Palin or she could choose to withdraw. While such an event seems unlikely given her popularity in some quarters of the party—Jacob Heilbrunn has suggested that social conservatives would view her ouster as “political infidelity”—her rocky reception makes the “Eagleton scenario,” and how it might unfold, a subject of more than academic interest. Interviews with Republicans and legal experts today shed light on how the process could play out. At any point before tomorrow night, McCain could simply replace Palin. But once she formally accepts her nomination, he’ll no longer have the power to do so unilaterally. According to Ben Ginsberg, the former general council at the Republican National Committee, Republican rules stipulate that the 168 members of the national committee would need to ratify any replacement to make it official.

Maybe McCain will keep Palin. After all, the damage to his campaign has already been done. Dumping her will cause even more damage. This is sort of like that stupid decision on March 19, 2003. Once we invaded Iraq, we were stuck with the quagmire.