"Original Mavericks"

You can sort of see, from this new McCain-Palin advertisement, why it's so crucial for Barack Obama to link John McCain to the Republican Party.  BTW: the ad claims that Palin "stopped the Bridge to Nowhere," which is technically true but functionally false. No blowback, though: the electorate doesn't seem to penalize campaigns for deliberately distorting the record of their candidate and their opponent. It's probably an artifact of twenty years' worth of campaign advertisements and has something to do with the way consumers process news. In any event....