If favorable liberal reactions to Sarah Palin’s speech last night are any indication, the Democratic ticket may never recover. To start our sampling, consider Tom Shales, the Washington Post‘s aging TV critic. (I use “aging” advisedly: how can anyone with any memory argue that “Reagan’s time in the White House was a virtual love affair with the press, whom he charmed as infectiously as he charmed the whole country”?) In his review today, he takes Palin very seriously, concluding:

She proved herself in the great arena; that’s what counts politically. Nobody could watch that speech and still consider her a joke, no matter how flimsy her credentials and qualifications may seem on paper. The joke, it seems, is on those who’d been laughing at her. Last night the laughing ended — and the cheering began.

Then there’s Mother Jones‘s David Corn, an upstanding lefty with no reason whatsoever to defend Palin, which makes his assessment, as the friend who drew my attention to the MJ link noted, one of the “most credible” out there:

Decrying the Democrats as tax-hikers and national security weaklings, while blasting Washington, is the usual fare for Republicans. But Palin read her lines with flair and confidence. And–can we be frank?–she looked darn good doing so. She was with the program: this election is not as much about change, hope, or issues as it is about the measure of one man…. It’s some ticket: a made-in-small-town-America working mom and the man who goes off to war to protect her way of life.

Finally, how could one resist a story headlined on Slate‘s home page this way: “O’Rourke: The political eros of Sarah Palin” — particularly if you assumed the author in question is P.J. O’Rourke. Turns out it’s not, but Megan O’Rourke is plenty sharp-minded herself:

What made Palin appealing wasn’t that she was pretty in a beauty-contest kind of way, but that she possessed a real charge as she spoke, a charge that derived from her palpable sense of enjoyment at finding her voice and being loved for it….What Hillary Clinton pretended to be at the end of her campaign, Sarah Palin is: a red-blooded Middle American populist.

What do the Democrats do now?