The Huffington Post says it best, Palin was a Pawn:-
Still, so did an even more alarming realization: Sarah Palin wasn't a power broker; she was a pawn. Her selection as VP, a move brokered by campaign manager Steve "The Bullet" Schmidt and allowed through by McCain's flimsy hold on his own campaign, was far worse than a mere cynical "political stunt." It was an act of cultural abuse; an exploitation of Palin's own novice aspirations, and an insult not only to the women whose votes the McCain campaign had hoped to sway, but to the millions of "real" Americans to whom the politically and socially naive Palin was expected to be an object of identification.
The later abject tokenism of Joe the Plumber took this gross manipulation of the working-class to new heights, but the real Freedom Fry fake-out starts with Palin. The GOP leadership plucks from obscurity an ambitious but woefully uninformed, inexperienced small-town mayor and small-state governor, whose narrow-minded, backward views are likely less deliberately sinister than just sadly symptomatic of her insulated upbringing, and splashes her out onto the battlefield of presidential politics with little more than an overpriced Neiman-Marcus wardrobe and a gaggle of shopworn, Salvation Army talking-points. Naturally, she got shot down. (Even if she did finally learn to pronounce "Ahmadinejad.")
Full article-
James Rotondi: The Tears Were Real; Palin Was A Pawn
A cynical neo-con populist manoeuvre, that rightfully backfired.