Mark the day: September 11, 2008. It’s when Barack Obama clinched the presidency of the United States. It’s the day when the first answers from Sarah Palin’s carefully orchestrated interview with safe, “mild-mannered,” slow-pitch ABC interlocutor, Charles Gibson, hit the web. And it didn’t look pretty for the Alaska beauty queen.

She came off cocksure when subtlety was required. She came off puzzled when she should have been assured. She came off rehearsed and shallow, when she needed to be fluid and deep.

McCain’s apparent home run -- his bold choice of a young, fresh, and boldly confident governor from our nation’s largest state – is now an irrevocable foul ball. That good, decent, charmingly accented Marge from “Fargo,” who seemed so transformative, has been revealed as a transmogrified Dan Quayle. Or, worse, a person who is more ill-prepared than Potato(e) Dan, but doesn’t know it.

Sarah, it’s over.

By November 5, 2008, this Hail Mary from the tundra, this moose-hunting, fly-fishing, aerial fox-killing, global-warming-denying, Intelligent-Design-believing, homo-fearing creationist nicknamed “Sarah Barracuda” will be packing her bags back to the northwest outpost of “Nimrod Nation,” where she will probably remain, lest she someday make a Congressional run as an unjustly wronged Katherine Harris with an assault rifle. Because, madam, you haven’t got what it takes to be president or vice-president of the United States. No way, no how, not now.

No doubt Sarah’s stumbles are cause for ecstatic hallelujahs in Obama-land. They’ve rendered secondary the recent navel-gazing on where Obama should target his sizable campaign stash, how he should fine-tune his policy message into a winning series of Clintonian soundbites, and how best to win the crucial and coveted Rust Belt vote (where the campaign’s Thomas Friedman vision of a green economy isn’t quite cutting it). Obama can coast to the finish line by running loops of Palin’s interview answers: on “the Bush Doctrine” (she didn’t even know what it was); on Georgia (the POTUS-in-training doesn’t realize that NATO can’t accept a member until its borders are clear, stable, and universally recognized); on the Russian invasion of South Ossetia (to say that it was “unprovoked” is nuts; even Georgian sympathizers acknowledge that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili started this mess). But coasting on Palin alone would be a stroke of hubris that even the famously self-adoring Obama would not attempt.

While the Palin implosion may be a relief to moderates who hopped on the Obama bandwagon, it should not be. First, because Obama himself is not ready to be commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military. He has no experience in military affairs, and his view of how, when, where, and why to use our military strength is amateur and reactive at best. But compared to Palin, the normally cringe-inducing (when it comes to foreign policy) Obama looks like the head of the Council on Foreign Relations. Compared to even the under-achieving Crotty, Palin does not come out very well. Jeepers, Sarah, most high school debaters know what the Bush Doctrine is.

Secondly, Palin will now become such a palpable albatross, such a cruel and preposterous joke, that the now-inevitable election of Obama means we in America will not have a much-needed discussion on the future of American empire. I believe in American exceptionalism, not in providential terms, but in practical terms. In a fractious world, we are duty-bound to be an example of liberty, strength and compassion. I am not convinced Mr. Obama shares this grand view in all its particulars. I know for certain that John McCain does. While the presidential debates will hopefully elevate this discussion, they probably will not. To our great loss as a nation.

Third, John McCain is as qualified a commander-in-chief we have had since Dwight Eisenhower, yet now, because of the Palin distraction, his singular voice will not be fully heard. His judgment was clearly lacking in his pick of this proud, but patronizing, hockey mom. He was poorly served by advisors who convinced him to pander to the wackadoo GOP fringe, instead of the sensible center, which will, in fact, decide this election. McCain didn’t trust his instincts (Lieberman, Ridge, or even Romney would have been perfect) and seems to have snubbed the GOP’s foreign policy establishment (Lugar, Warner, Rice, and Bolton), who would have advised against the pick. The ensuing Palin problem will represent one more indignity that John McCain has to suffer in his life, though this time he has only himself to blame.

Though entertaining, the Palin fiasco is mostly tragic. If ever there was a time when this country needed a battle-tested maverick like John McCain, it is now. To finish the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with success, strength, and dignity. To reduce the bloated budget bequeathed to us by the indulgent Democratically-controlled Congress and our sadly incurious Regent play-acting as President. To strengthen our battered currency. To bring dignity to science, and competent non-partisanship to the Justice Department. To achieve real immigration and campaign finance reform. And to restore a sense of personal responsibility, instead of entitlement, as the operating credo of America.

It is the latter point that means the most to me. The very word “entitlement” should be troubling to anyone who values hard work and keeping one’s house in order. We are moving towards second-rate status as a nation because so many of us – rich, middle class, working class, and poor -- have an entitled view of this country, instead of one based on Emersonian self-reliance. McCain would change that view by his very mien.

Finally, the failure of Palin is a huge setback for women. Palin is now revealed to be an adamantine imposter; a pre-modern, pre-scientific true believer. Of course, in Bush's Holy War against Islam, she is the perfect Medieval foil to Al Qaeda's backward-leaning caliphate. But a Holy War is not what we need to stifle Islamic terrorism, even if "God" is on "our" side, Sarah (oh, sorry, forgot, you were actually referencing Abraham Lincoln). Sadly for us all, it's now the Sarah Palim Freak Show, with her special needs child, her preggers teen daughter, her hockey-playing hunk-in-law, cute little Piper, and that commercial fishin’, oil workin’, snowmachine racin’, husband named Todd (a former member of the Alaska Independence Party, donchaknow). It’s as if McCain hired Jerry Springer to lure Snow White from obscurity, cram her with some sterile and inflexible talking points, and make her stand in for a world leader of real merit. It’s like Bill Veeck sending midget Eddie Gaedel to bat in 1952.

Barack Obama is correct on at least one point. It is indeed “silly season” in politics. And it has never ever been sillier than now. We should all be ashamed as Americans for what we have witnessed and will have to witness for the next several weeks.

I feel bad for Ms. Palin because, in her admirable, can-do, “yeah, sure, you betcha” way, she actually believed she was ready for prime time. I would feel more compassion for her if she, in turn, was a trifle more reflective. But, in her desperate attempt to appear qualified and on top of her game, she came across as stridently hollow, as if she’s covering up canyons of insecurity beneath a mountain of bluster. We deserve better. The world deserves better from us.

I so wanted to side with Ms. Palin because it rankles me to the core that glib elites in this nation think that an Ivy League indoctrination is the sine qua non of higher office. I went to Northwestern University as an undergraduate and St. John’s College Santa Fe as a grad student. I am proud of both choices. I was rejected by Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism four times, even though I had achieved great success in writing and publishing. I edited and published my own nationally recognized magazine (Monk), authored several books for major league publishing houses, invented dashboard publishing and helped pioneer the mobile office. For years I requested that Columbia show me why they continued to reject me, but, in their arrogance, they wouldn’t. They were cowards. I knew the answer. I was too strong, too confident, and insufficiently apologetic about my race, sex, socioeconomic background, and bold entrepreneurial direction in life. Columbia and other Ivy League institutions hate men like me. They despise us. They loathe anything that connotes strength, honor, and pride in one’s country and one’s self. It’s no wonder they ban ROTC from their campus, while giving the bigoted Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a platform. You can have an anarchist group at Columbia, but not the very military that protects that anarchist group’s right to free speech. That is shameful and disgusting.

That Sarah Palin did not come from the America-is-the-problem school of self and national castigation was a breath of fresh air. The killjoys on the left had not ripped her inborn chutzpah out at an early and vulnerable age. Her Nietzschean self-reliance was nurtured on the vast open lands of Alaska. Oh, how I wished she could have been that proud, strong and capable frontier woman occasionally found in my own state of Nebraska; a bold contrast to the smug, cynical, and supremely arrogant patriot-haters that prosper within the Ivy League’s culture of complaint.

Unfortunately, Sarah is not that woman. She is not that Willa Cather pioneer. She represents just the opposite: the righteous and intemperate pride in ignorance that characterizes right-wing talk-show blather and the sincere and troubling belief that faith and purpose trump facts.

And so we are again left with the same old, tired, and dysfunctional dichotomy: the entitlement-demanding, quota-loving, America-haters on the left versus the noisome anti-intellectual, country-right-or-wrong fact-deniers on the right. And in the messy, difficult, enormously complex middle is the truth, once again left out like a monk in the cold.

One day there will be a female candidate of the Middle Way, who will enable America to be America again. Sadly, as Sarah Palin revealed so painfully last night, that time is not now.