Europeans have greeted the news of Sarah Palin's nomination for Vice President of the United States with a predictable mixture of anger, frustration, resentment and resignation. After more than a year of uncritically praising Barack Obama as a supernatural figure destined by fate to solve all of the world's problems, European elites are suddenly coming to terms with the unwelcome possibility that the junior senator from Illinois might just be another human being after all.

"Who literally believes that Jonah made his home in a whale's abdomen? Nobody really, apart from the US president-and the woman who was recently added to the 2008 Republican ticket.... Sarah Palin is the latest politician to carry the torch of science misinformation tainted by religious dogma lit during the Reagan administration and nurtured by George Bush.... Yet centuries after the Enlightenment, Sarah Palin, the putative US vice-president, can endorse the passing off of Bible stories as scientific facts, dressed up as the oxymoronic term ‘creationist science'."

"Sarah Palin's Pentacostalist [sic] past explains a lot about what she says in public, but the McCain campaign wants to play it down. Can a gas pipeline really be a manifestation of God's will?.... Sarah Palin has shown a habit of investing secular matters with religious meaning.... Palin acts as though all political decisions emanated directly from a divine resolution-and as if the Republican understanding of this resolution were the only one that could be correct."

"With the nomination of Sarah Palin as vice-presidential candidate, John McCain took on exactly what Obama avoided at all costs with Biden: A much-talked-about risk. McCain/Palin-this is where real life romps." Another columnist writes: Sarah Palin "has a closed, conservative-in part reactionary-worldview. The coordinates of her value system are well known: Family, military strength, small government, a confident America. But there is a new face to these traditional values. This is a great attraction.... This competition is an unexpected threat for Barack Obama."

"There is absolutely nothing wrong with ultra-conservative Republicans, amid their otherwise steadfast evangelical certainly, to make a U-turn. In the past for instance, when dealing with a mother of five and soon-to-be grandmother, they would not have been so quick and would even have considered it reckless to advise her to take on a job as well, let alone one of such importance."

"McCain's hubris and irresponsibility are by now blatant. Hubris, because only a belief in his own immortality for the next four years could justify the choice of a vice president whose only experience, aside from two years as governor of Alaska, was as mayor of a suburb of Anchorage. Irresponsibility, because US presidents run a high risk of being attacked, as exemplified by John F Kennedy's assassination, as well as by the attack on Ronald Reagan. Imagine what would happen if a President McCain were shot...The world would wake up the next morning to a President Palin.... More has been publicized in the last few days about Palin's person and family than about her views on domestic and foreign politics, which shows neither the American intellectual condition nor their public media in the best light. A preacher moderated the first debate between presidential nominees Obama and McCain during which they had to answer questions on faith and how they would handle the evil bad guys of the world. A politician whose attitude toward war and peace are largely a mystery could become president in five months, and people discuss the implications of her daughter's pregnancy. The country where all this is happening is the most powerful in the world. But for how much longer?"

"McCain used to look like an ideal candidate for the party. The conservative free-spirit repeatedly defied the current president and thereby emanated seriousness and self-assurance.... Sarah Palin threatens to demolish [McCain's] halo.... The lingering impression [is] that McCain called this fresh face to his side purely out of strategic campaign calculations.... Palin's selection comes across as imprudent, unserious and, yes, dangerous.... McCain has miscalculated: those Democrats who were disappointed by Hillary's failure and might possibly have voted for the Republican veteran will hardly be lured by the ultraconservative pro-lifer.... McCain only hopes that the evangelical base will gather behind him with new fury. That is important, but not enough to win the election in November. The payoff for this deputy from the right is less than the price of the risk that McCain runs with the center. Sarah Palin will cost the Republican Party dearly."

"a figure who comes from the America that is farthest removed from, and incomprehensible to, the European spectator...[who] represents values and policy proposals...the outlawing of abortion, the preponderance of religious faith, the supremacy of the traditional family, the subjection of the State to individual initiative..."

"seems to be treacherously undermining the huge dose of goodwill that European public opinion has devoted to Obama. Now the governor of Alaska, a member of the National Rifle Association, who promotes her state as the land of hunters, is the exact opposite of Barack Obama."

"Our old error is prejudging rather than trying to understand. That is why we never forgive the United States while we absolve every other country in the world.... Even if Europeans believe otherwise; Obama is not in heaven, but in the middle of a presidential campaign."

"Palin can sell what no candidate other can offer: a boring and hardscrabble American life. Not only is Palin ‘one of ours,' according to enthusiastic Republican voters, who have awakened from their slumber with unusual force, but she could be anyone's niece. A real peanut butter girl." The newspaper concludes: "Undoubtedly, of all of the surprises of this campaign, [Palin] is the most brilliant. With her nomination, McCain has shown two things: that he is very smart and that he is not yet defeated."