Unnamed Republican consultants tell Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic that  they are “struggling with” the Palin pick. “They expect her to have a good week… and then to crash and burn when she hits the campaign trail as scrutiny catches up with her.”

Perhaps. That’s one reaction from people angry that someone was chosen whose campaign business it never even occurred to them to seek. On the larger point, if you had to pick a politician in the United States most likely to say something embarrassing to party and candidate, your best guide to whether that would happen would be whether the person in question had a history of such misbehavior. Palin is from a small far-away state, but she took on a powerful party Establishment during the era of YouTube. There were plenty of people gunning for her. One can presume that if she had a history of gaffe-making, there would already be at least a limited record of it.

On the other hand, Joe Biden is the gaffe gift that keeps on giving — just last year he made two huge blunders, one about Obama being nice and clean for a black man, and another about how you have to speak in an Indian accent to get served at a 7-11. Biden has been making mistakes like this for at least two decades on a fairly regular basis. If you had to bet, the smart money would be on Biden blowing it first — because he has stuck his foot in his mouth so frequently before and because even over the past week he has shown signs of indiscipline and an overenthusiastic mouth.