Bricker: I will attempt to respond seriously and politely to your post. We’ll see how that goes 
First of all, as others have pointed out, change doesn’t happen overnight. And in particular, it’s still less than a week after Palin was announced, less than a day after she gave her big speech, and less than a few days after most of us have even heard of the various issues/scandals/whatever that might be surrounding her. The anti-Obama campaign was talking about his lack of experience, deceptively misrepresenting his “present” votes, mocking his perceived elitism, and endlessly harping on his “bitter” remark months ago, and they’re still doing so now. They’ve found their happy Obama-bashing groove, and they’re sitting in it. The current Palin furor is fairly comparable to what was going on in the days immediately following the Jeremiah Wright revelations. That has (to a large degree) died down now. What do you think people will be saying about Palin a week from now or a month from now or when she’s debating Joe Biden?
And the fact that change doesn’t happen instantly and completely doesn’t mean it’s not happening at all. Obama’s campaign (particularly if one focuses just on the campaign itself) is clearly the most clean and positive major presidential campaign in a long time. If it wins, people will learn something from that. Does that mean there will never be another negative campaign, or another media flurry about fairly irrelevant issues? Of course not. But it is FAR more likely to be a step in that direction thatn if the most clean and positive campaign in a long time is defeated, which will pretty much pound the nail in the coffin of anything other than bile.
Secondly, I think you’re vastly overestimating the extent to which Palin is actually being bashed or treated unfairly. There is a HUGE amount of press/discussion/SDMB-thread-posting about her right now. But how much of that is actually negative comments about her for trivial reasons, as opposed to some combination of:
-People commenting about, or discussing, the existence of those negative comments
-People defending her against those negative comments
-People whining about those negative comments
-People on the left attempting in good faith to discuss issues that in some way relate to those negative things without the discussion getting sidetracked into total negativity
-People talking about any of the above 3
-Etc.
(Also, when you see a SDMB thread in which virulently-anti-Palin are actually being posted, and there are some, how many of them are the work of a small number of particular vocal posters? Diogenese the Cynic is only one man, but he does the posting of 20, for instance.)
And in further particular, how much of the negativity towards her has actually come from either the Obama campaign itself, or from major national political or media figures? And how realistic is it to in any way imagine that there WON’T be huge flurries of discussion of her on places like the SDMB? I mean, here’s a woman who a week ago no one had heard of. Suddenly she’s one of the 4 most important people in the country, and we suddenly get reports of a whole bunch of, bluntly, titillating and salacious and potentially horrifying (she banned books?) rumors. What are we doing to do? NOT post on the SDMB about them?
Message board posts occupy an odd place. On the one hand, they’re on the internet and are more or less permanently and totally publically visible for anyone to see. So they’re kind of like published writing. On the other hand, they tend to feel more like a casual conversation. If I was sitting around the dinner table chatting with people and someone said “hey, did you hear this rumor that Sarah Palin’s 5 month old daughter is really her granddaughter?” I would be interested, and I’d ask what evidence there was for this rumor. I wouldn’t say “hahaha LOL she is a lying bitch evil conservative hypocrite”, but neither would I say “hey, that is not a topic that we ought to be discussing, a candidate’s personal life is off the table”. On the other hand, if I were (in some insane universe) the author/host/editor of a national publication of some sort, I would CERTAINLY not include that rumor*. So I’m posting on a message board. How should I act?
*It’s possible that I would address the existence of the rumor if it were already sufficiently widespread, although there’s an extent to which even addressing rumors like that gives them the imprimateur of authority. It’s a tricky issue.
