I also liked this bit from today's Post:
Palin had been on the Obama short list for a few weeks, and then had been taken off when stories about her efforts to get her brother-in-law fired from the Alaska state police broke.
Dunn, the senior Obama adviser, had the unique perspective of having run a campaign against Palin two years earlier, as an adviser to Alaskan gubernatorial candidate Tony Knowles. She considered Palin a formidable and charismatic politician; she also had a grasp of Palin's thin record and her history on the "bridge to nowhere," and had sat through numerous Palin-Knowles debates.
That Palin expertise, shared by few in the country, would steady the Obama campaign at a moment when national Democrats embarked on what one adviser described as "two weeks of total hysteria" over the Alaska governor.
Dunn had the research staff stop putting so much energy into Palin, convinced that she could not pass the vetting process. "How was I to know that they weren't going to vet her?" she said
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/04/AR2008110404531_4.html?sid=ST2008110403463&s_pos=