The New Yorker has endorsed Barack Obama for President and in doing so summed up my feelings about Sarah Palin far more eloquently than I ever could. I have been trying to think of the way I could post my absolute bewilderment and sickening realisation this woman could lead the free world for a while and now I don’t have to.

We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility.

At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness… It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

Read the full editorial here.