I’ve been driving all day from Jackson, Tennessee to Dallas, so I haven’t caught any of the online reaction to McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin to be his running mate. In fact, I caught about five minutes of NPR from Texarkana before the radio signal faded, so all I really know is what she said in a very brief excerpt from her acceptance speech (mostly just an echo of Clinton’s glass ceiling line).

That being the case, I’m going to play guess who said what. Y’all can score me, cool?

Major right-wing blogs: Knee-jerk reaction is pissed. Primarily because the choice of Palin takes away their “Obama’s too inexperienced” line of attack, which was a lot of what they had. McCain more or less decided with this choice that “experience” is not a serious criterion for the Presidency at the moment, and I reckon they’ve got a couple of days, maybe even weeks, of adjusting before they can roll with the new program and pretend that they didn’t spend months outlining how important experience is.

Major left-wing blogs: Giddy and mean, with the occasional touch of misogyny. Thoughtful attacks on her from Digby (maybe with some line about the cynicism of the McCain campaign in courting Clinton supporters with an “any woman will do” attitude?) and less thoughtful commentary from some main-pagers at Kos and HuffPo types. Someone probably said something about her voice being shrill, someone probably made a derogatory reference to the fact that she’s pretty. Everybody’s glad that she doesn’t seem to bring much to the ticket, though they’re also a little disappointed it’s not Romney or Lieberman.

Traditional media pundits: Excited! Super duper excited! Gosh, how exciting! Mostly because she wasn’t on their radar, and since campaigns tend to be boring, any surprise is awesome for them. Lots of stupid stuff about whether or not this trumps Obama’s change credentials, maybe some slightly more thoughtful questions about whether this means McCain is desperate or not (with the answer being a resounding no, and wow, something interesting happened!). Some head-to-head comparison of Palin and Biden in which some idiot pundit remarks that McCain and Obama each chose a running mate who resembles their opponent. Tears of blood from the eyes of the readers who can’t handle the word maverick anymore.

Religious conservatives: Vague relief, but no real enthusiasm.A strong sense of it could have been worse and a renewed vow to not not support McCain in the general, punctuated with further expressions of distaste for Lieberman, Ridge, Romney, etc.

PUMAs: A few of the most vocal members outright endorse McCain from this, while most use it as an opportunity to attack Obama for not nominating Clinton as his VP, along with rote lines about how they’ll never support him, he stole the nomination, etc, etc. The same basic routine from the group, with the occasional member who was leaning toward McCain anyway feeling validated.

As for me? Speaking as a fan of the sport of American Presidential politics, I think it’s a sharp move. He wasn’t going to win on experience alone anyway, so taking that issue off the table doesn’t hurt him much. With the harsh opposition to almost every shortlister he could have named, the best he could hope to do was grab a non-entity who wouldn’t hurt him. It seems like most people guessed Pawlenty, but Palin is a more interesting choice, both because she’s a woman and because her name hadn’t been kicked around much, and a chance to be interesting is an opportunity that must be seized by the McCain camp right now. She’s something of a pander to the religious conservatives, in that she’s a bit more of a Fundie than McCain, but she’s not a major player to them, and so she won’t generate a ton of enthusiasm- I expect that she’s mostly a non-entity to them, who changes very little of their opinion of McCain (as opposed to a Lieberman pick, which would have alienated them entirely, or some nutjob like Brownback or Santorum, who’d have touched ‘em in their special places). She’ll hurt him among the major water-carriers right now, but they’ll bounce back in predictable fashion. She’s at least as good a choice as Joe Biden was.

A Lieberman or Ridge pick would have all but guaranteed Obama the Presidency, while a full-on zealot would have invalidated much of McCain’s appeal among independents. I think, honestly, his best chance to win would have been to go the mega-Fundie route, and I’m glad he didn’t. I’m also glad, however, that he didn’t pick a sure loser like Lieberman or Romney. While the immediate effect would have almost certainly been an Obama win pre-ordained in early September, the long-term effect would have been confirmation that the Fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party would get to demand concessions from all future candidates that would have played out very poorly for sane Americans everywhere. We’re better off that he didn’t pick someone who would have killed his campaign, and that he didn’t do a full-on pander in an attempt to get the ground organizations of the major churches in his camp.