Remember when Democrats were scared Palin was going to propel McCain to victory? It is easy to forget that McCain took a small lead in national polling after the Palin pick and the St. Paul convention. Since that brief period of glory, though, the McCain camp has probably been kicking itself as Palin’s candidacy fell into farce. As the country has seen more of Palin, they have been less and less impressed. A full 59% of people now think she is not prepared for the vice presidency, up 9% since the beginning of the month.

The worse news for McCain is that the NY Times/CBS poll also shows that a third of voters say the vice presidential picks have “a great deal of influence” on their vote. It’s no surprise that a large majority of these voters support Obama.

This result really negates the conventional wisdom that VP picks don’t matter, that people vote for the top of the ticket. While I agree that you shouldn’t vote based on the VPs themselves, seeing who the candidates choose for VP can tell you a lot about them. McCain’s selection of Palin really called into question the entire premise of his campaign: that he puts country first.

People have finally realized that (as he has during the entire campaign) McCain put his candidacy first. He needed to rally the base and adopt change (”reform”) as a slogan, so he picked a hard right-wing relative unknown. But he also picked a woefully unprepared, unvetted unknown. Whoops.

As a number of prominent conservatives have endorsed Obama in the last couple weeks, often citing the Palin pick as a reason for defecting, it has become clear that Sarah Palin is, as David Brooks put it, a “fatal cancer to the Republican party.”

She has dragged down McCain. She might just do the same to the GOP.