Having hung all their hopes on a haloed herald of hallucinatory charisma and having established superficiality over substance as the electoral standard, Obama supporters forfeited all credibility to criticize Sarah Palin for lack of experience or excess of charisma.
But that won't stop them from trying, as they are never bound by what they said yesterday. And trying they are, as they desperately shoot their stopped-up popguns at Palin, only to injure themselves with the backfire of betrayed liberal commitments to gender equality.
Besides, there is a fundamental difference between the excitement once generated by Barack Obama and that presently inspired by Sarah Palin: Obama's was not grounded in any semblance of reality.
Americans cannot rely on promises of undefined hope. They can find no stability in aimless change. They cannot bank our national security on angry denunciations of America. And they won't easily squander their liberty in exchange for the class-warfare politics of envy and redistribution.
While there is plenty of enthusiasm surrounding Sarah Palin, little of it is irrationally based. None of her supporters believes that she is flawless or that she possesses supernatural qualities.
To the contrary, it's her very authenticity that appeals to us, her decency, her commitment to family, her unapologetic veneration for America's founding principles and traditional values -- the very principles and values that are repugnant to the elites.
When you look at Palin, you don't get the idea that she believes she is superior to other human beings or "the one we've been waiting for." One can't imagine her being comfortable being treated as infallible, being placed on an artificial pedestal or voluntarily remaining there through such unspeakably presumptuous extravaganzas as Berlin and Invesco Field.
But with delicious irony, the outcome of this presidential race could well turn not so much on the marked difference in humility between Obama and Palin, but between Obama and McCain.
Had Obama been willing to bury the hatchet and share the limelight with rival Hillary Clinton, no less a political genius than Karl Rove believes he would have been unbeatable. Gratifyingly, McCain was a big enough man to choose and surrender the spotlight to Sarah Palin.