Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal. After the past 10 days, it is not remarkable that Mr. McCain has caught up with Mr. Obama. It is amazing that Mr. Obama is still roughly even with Mr. McCain.

There is no denying that Mr. Obama is in a bad place, that he must now be considered the underdog, that he's wearing Loser-Glo. The slide started with the Rick Warren interviews in August, just as America was starting to pay attention. Verdict? McCain: normal. Obama: odd.

Then Mrs. Palin, and the catastrophe of the Democratic and media response to her. Books will be written about this, but because it's so recent, and so known, we're almost not absorbing how huge it was, and is. Here was the central liberal mistake: They used the atom bomb just a few days in. They used it so brutally, and yet so ineptly, in a way so oblivious to the true contours of the field, that the radiation blew back over their own lines. They used it without preliminary diplomatic talks, multilateral meetings or Security Council debate. They just went boom. And it boomeranged.

The atom bomb was personal and sexual perfidy, backwoods knuckle-draggin' ma and pa saying, Tell the neighbors the baby's ours. Then the ritual abuse of the 17-year-old girl. Then the rest of it—bad mother, religious weirdo. (On this latter it must be noted that Mrs. Palin never told a church that the Iraq war was God's will; she asked them to pray that it was God's will. It wasn't the sound of Republican hubris, it was the sound of Christian humility: We can't know the mind of God, we can only pray we are in accord with it.)

All of this was unacceptable to normal Americans. They experienced it as the town gossip spreading rumor and slander before the new neighbor even got to put down her bags. It offended the American sense of fairness. And—it still lives!—gallantry.

Most crucially, the snobbery of it, the meanness of it, reminded the entire country, for the first time in a decade, what it is they don't like about the left. Really, America had forgotten. Mr. Obama's friends reminded them. Unforgettably.

And it wasn't just excitable bloggers or 24-hour cable news shows desperate to fill the maw. The chairwoman of the South Carolina Democratic Party said this week that Mrs. Palin's "primary qualification [for vice president] seems to be that she hasn't had an abortion."

The Democrats were up against Xena the Warrior Princess and came across, in response, as pale-lipped Puritans who actually, at the end of the day, don't really like women all that much. Mrs. Palin radiates the sense that she'd never give up her femininity in her quest for power because her femininity is part of her power. (On the Democratic side, she can be compared in this to Nancy Pelosi.)

A certain normal-versus-sissy template was captured in a deadly email that is making the rounds. It offers two pictures. One is of a young Mrs. Palin in a short skirt, smiling at the camera as she leans against a big ol' motorcycle. The other is of a thin and careful Obama on a bicycle, in a plastic safety helmet, looking like a tony suburban professional trying to lower his carbon footprint. The headline on the email: "This settles it."

Read it all.