“A team of mavericks.”

Wait, what?

I typed in that headline last night but TBogg, the king of snark ,  got to point it out first because, after juggling the Phillies second playoff game (win) and the debate last night, I gave up and went to bed early.

When you’re beaten by the master, you can live with that.

What do I think about last night? Oh, a myriad things but it really doesn’t matter. I’m with the invaluable Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight.com (a site everyone of you should have bookmarked):

I suspect that the Sarah Palin chapter of the campaign is largely over. She may draw large crowds in her next couple of public appearances; it’s also not out of the question that the media will sour on her performance in the forthcoming days, once it’s been removed somewhat from her safety net of low expectations. But after that, she may largely fade into the background, and if she is making news, it may not be for reasons the McCain campaign likes.

We shall see what the polls say (the only early results I’ve seen all give Biden a substantial margin), but that really doesn’t matter. At this point, in terms of Electoral votes, Obama has merely to hold what he has and McCain has to fight like hell to get more than he has. Simple as that.

It will get pretty nasty now. There will be a slew or racism, subliminal in the mainstream, vicious under the radar. The Rovians running the McCain Campaign and the Right Wing Scream Machine have no other option than to pull out the stops and go negative in a big way. It’s all they really know how to do in any case.

The mainstream media will help them if they can, not for ideological reasons (in most cases) but because all they really want is a “story,” damn the facts and the importance of the issues. Without a conflict, the press becomes as insignificant as George W. Bush. It’s the bed they made for themselves, having long ago given up any pretense of being serious.

There still remains the economy and the emerging recession, of course (and let’s not kid ourselves about that latter, we are on the verge of an 18-month to two-year downturn of serious proportions) and the possibility of the fabled October Surprise, no matter from when it might come, but, if everybody was being honest, it’s pretty difficult to imagine how McCain could win as we look at the landscape this morning.