all interesting...as you point out
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/09/18/us/20080918_POLLB_GRAPHIC.html
at the bottom left of the above graphic that only 17% of voters think Palin is qulified; 75% think she was only chosen to help McCain win. (compare that to Biden's numbers.) What this means is that, with the vote in general split by about 45/45, at least half--maybe more than half--of the people who say they are voting for McCain don't think that Palin is qualified to be VP.
Whatever the positive side of the poll, that is a pretty sad set of numbers. It also shows that the issue, as several people have pointed out here, is not just injecting "reality" into the minds of voters--of blog-bombing facts: people know she's wholly unqualified and they are still ready to put her in the driver's seat. Whether this is inspired by some "Left Behind" literality that reasons, "we are in the end times anyway--give that hockey mom a shot!" partisan rancor or, as this article sort of begins to get at, some deep seeded racism that would put a wholly unqualified white person in office any day if the alternative was a black man--they aren't budging. We can only hope that, since most of McCain's gains are in the geriatric category, mother nature will quickly thin these hardliners from the herd.
s