There's Vetting And Then There's Vetting

Confederate Yankee:

For reasons only "progressive" minds can fathom, several bloggers on the left think—or more likely, are perhaps wishing—that Sarah Palin, John McCain's newly-announced choice for Vice President, will drop out of the Presidential race.

Jeralyn Merritt, probably once the most consistently rational member of the leftist blogosphere, is actively promoting a drop-out pool.

Merritt claims that McCain must force Palin out because she wasn't adequately vetted, and then quite seriously suggests that Obama was:

Obama presented himself for 17 months to the American people, they heard him debate more than a dozen times, they made their own decision that he was ready for the job and the Democrats voted him their nominee.

Obama wasn't unilaterally appointed by a party's nominee in a transparent play for the evangelical and female vote. As if Sarah Palin could fill Hillary Clinton's shoes by virtue of her gender. As if women wouldn't see that Sarah Palin is the antithesis of Hillary Clinton on issues. As if anything would evoke Palin's lack of qualifications more than to compare them to Hillary's.

We now know far more about Sarah Palin in just four days than we've learned about Barack Obama in 17 months. That is just sad. It's a pathetic reflection of the mainstream media's unwillingness to do their jobs for fear of finding stories that would hurt the candidate so many of them openly desire to win.

But periodically appearing to read teleprompters isn't vetting, not matter how many months a candidate has done it, and Obama's ability to perform in set-piece debates is both dubious—Hillary once famously took him apart—and irrelevant. Barack Obama really has never been fully vetted. He hasn't even come close.