If Sarah Palin had done for poll support for the Republican presidential ticket on which she has second billing what she has done for the ratings of Saturday Night Live on which she has top billing, John McCain should be set to surf into the White House on a tsunami of support, while Barack Obama sinks to the obscurity of a footnote in history.

But the nine-point lead currently accorded Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama tends to indicate only that McCain will not be hanging ten, but drowning, while Obama paces himself easily towards the prize. The Republican Party and in particular the handlers of the McCain campaign are as much to blame for this as anyone else.

Conventional wisdom has it that the choice of Palin was made as a means of mobilising the Republican base, and whatever your ideological or partisan affiliation, that is not an abnormal aspiration for a party to have. Apart from, notably, a court decision in 2000, George Bush in large measure owes the two terms of his presidency to a mobilised conservative wing.

The saddest spectacle about the use of Palin by her party has been the tantamount lack of trust and confidence in her that it has shown. Undoubtedly there has been more than a measure of sexism, latent or not, in the negative treatment of Palin by some in the media and by commentators in the main. But the greatest has been by her own party, because what else can explain the fact that for a relatively long time she has been shielded from spontaneous media interaction, offered only through partisan events as a symbol - in large part, "we see (saw?) your Hillary and raise you a Sarah", and only now allowed to emerge as someone to speak in her own words?

In the past 24 hours or so, stories have emerged of her airstrip ad hoc unscripted answering of journalists' questions, and just as this is being written, CNN is running tape of her sit-down with the international broadcaster. As with so much of the McCain-Palin campaign, it has the air of, if not too little, certainly too late. It would take a political miracle for Palin to turn around from being the liability for the McCain camp that she has been allowed to become.

We have all heard the politely scathing things that Colin Powell had to say about his view of Palin's lack of fitness to step into the Oval Office should the need arise. Her broader popularity outside the ranks of those who share her political, social and economic views (whatever the last-mentioned are, apart from the fact she seems to have a deep distaste for "European socialism", whatever that is) is largely as a comic turn, fodder for SNL and others.

At least one journalist reporting on her spontaneous engagements with the media in recent days has noted that the Palin of these occasions was not the incoherent, superficial gabbler of the Katie Couric interviews. Right-wing websites delight in pointing out that lately she leads in the media availability stakes, especially against her Democratic counterpart, Joe Biden. They are not wrong, but it also has to be remembered that right now, Obama-Biden is playing a defensive game, not wanting to risk anything, certainly not any ventures into Terra Spontaneous, that dangerous terrain where dragons dwell.

But too late…a New York Times/CBS poll reported on October 21 2008 said that while Obama was up 10 points to record highs compared with any candidate in any election since such polls have been taken, McCain had lost 10 points, no doubt with Palin as a contributing factor to aggravate his own superficial and irrelevancy-cluttered performance on the economy; Palin herself has plunged from 41 to 29. To know her is not to love her, this poll suggests.

Against the crushing weight of endorsements for Obama, with Google chief executive Eric Schmidt now added to Powell and many others, including the editors of many newspapers and even the Chicago Tribune, the latter until now traditionally Republican-leaning, the totems, slogans and spin offered by the McCain-Palin camp seem shallow and desperate: Joe the Plumber, "European socialism", the snide suggestion that Powell opting for Obama is racial solidarity.

Add to that the fact that the McCain-Palin campaign is doing less well than Obama-Biden in terms of money; add to that the indications that the Democratic campaign is doing better in grassroots mobilisation and organisation.

No amount of carping about the mainstream "liberal" media of the US will help the Republicans, any more than it ever has. Yes, it does seem that the media are as hypnotised by Obama as many others; probably, at least some editors and senior correspondents have a news instinct that an Obama presidency (including, would anyone admit, the "first African-American president" angle) would be more likely to intrigue readers and viewers than a McCain White House. Even if it sinks in generally that whoever takes office next year, in the post-9/11, post-bailout world, being president of the US would not be an evenly-paced, pre-determined machine management job.

As for Palin, already some pundits are talking about hopes revolving around her and the year 2012. All that would take is several random factors falling into place, and most of all, the Obama spell being broken in a splintering cascade of disillusionment. Picture, then, this year's Republicans - rightist and centrist - accompanied by the hitherto undecideds, marching on Washington four years from now, Palin in the vanguard, singing "We Shall Overcome".

Provided, of course, they remember the words, if they ever knew them.