Via Downwithtyranny, Howie Klein picked up on something I've been wondering would be a theme of the last 3 weeks of the campaign, a story in the London Times on how McCain and his people are starting to get irritated at the extent of Palin's hate-mongering, and on how her people feel that McCain is being too wimpy.
Sarah Palin lacks many qualities important to being president, but no one has claimed that she lacks ambition. She sees the writing on the wall, that McCain is going to lose, and she is not going down without doing everything in her power to position herself for another run, this time at the top of the ticket. In this, she and McCain have a conflict of interest, one that is not atypical for presidential tickets, but made all the more unusual because, well, Palin is very unusual.
Mark Salter, McCain’s long-serving chief of staff, is understood to have told campaign insiders that he would prefer his boss, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, to suffer an "honourable defeat" rather than conduct a campaign that would be out of character – and likely to lose him the election.
Nobody is saying that McCain isn't almost as bad, or didn't bring all this about himself, but it looks like the two camps may be headed for some more public infighting