In your heart you know he could be right, The Conservative Establishment’s Addiction to Tactics:
…John McCain was a widely admired war hero with a reputation for moderation who had favorable ratings well over 50 percent on Election Day and he lost to a first-term senator with a black nationalist spiritual mentor. Palin isn’t the most formidable candidate out there, and in a very close election her flaws could easily deny the GOP the White House. And very close elections do happen—think how important the 2000 presidential election was in retrospect. But most elections aren’t that close, and if the fundamentals are strongly against Obama—which they may be—Palin will beat him.
I have a friend who was active in conservative punditry up until the spring of 2008. He basically realized that he had no idea what was going on when Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. His own model, and 20 years of personal investment in research and analysis, indicated that the Clinton machine was just going to steamroll. Obviously Obama refuted the solidity of his model of the world in a really deep sense, and he decided to focus less on day to day politics, and more on bigger picture policy issues. The point is that in some ways there’s a lot more uncertainty here than we’d like to admit. The Republicans have modestly higher unfavorables right now than the Democrats, but they’ll still win big anyway. There’s always a first for everything.