Never Ask Me to Make Any Predictions

When John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, my first reaction was that the race was over and the Democrats will win for sure.

Here was my reasoning:
First, McCain has been running on the "old and experienced" ticket and now he was making a choice that would make it impossible to make such claims any more.

On top of that McCain is relatively old and not very healthy (McCain has a history of cancer and would be the oldest 1st term Prez ever) and I could not imagine that the country would be willing to take even a 1% chance that in the event that he can no longer be the president (in fact the risk might be much higher, as VPs have taken over the presidency 9 times out of 43 presidents.), the president will be someone with almost no experience.
There were other issues with this choice, but based only on these two, I predicted that the public opinion will turn against McCain rather quickly.

Clearly I was very wrong, which is just one more piece of evidence on how messed up my intuitions are. The good news is that I am sure there is an interesting research project hiding somewhere in this story.