The Palins have long denied wrongdoing, and the governor initially said she would cooperate with the bipartisan legislative inquiry. Now that she is Senator McCain’s running mate, however, the campaign says the inquiry has become a partisan political circus. It has accused Alaska Democrats of using it to hurt the Republican ticket.

Sarah Palin has spent most of this month out of state, campaigning with Senator McCain, and has endorsed neither Senator Stevens nor his opponent. But that has not stopped both candidates from trying to benefit from her enormous popularity in Alaska, which has only grown since she joined the McCain ticket.

As John McCain worked his way through Florida and Ohio this week as the Republican presidential nominee, he was a candidate transformed. He unsmilingly raced through a series of relatively brief speeches, reading often from a teleprompter, and served up a diet of the kind of sound-bite attacks that he used to dismiss with an eye roll.

Sarah Palin’s good looks are all very well if you are single and your dating pool consists only of vice-presidential candidates. But for the rest of us the question we’d ask is less likely to be “are you lonesome tonight?” and more likely to be “what are you going to do about this flailing economy? Iraq? Pakistan? Afghanistan? The health system?”

In a reversal of position, a key Democratic lawmaker said Wednesday he may convene the committee that is conducting the investigation into whether Palin dismissed her public safety commissioner when he would not fire a state trooper involved in a bitter divorce with her sister. This may be the first move in a push to delay the probe.

No Democratic presidential candidate has won Virginia since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, and the selection of Sarah Palin has improved Mr. McCain’s chances of carrying the state. Even so, Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, still clearly sees an opportunity here, and has opened more than 41 offices in the state.

Despite an intense effort to distance himself from the way his party has done business in Washington, Senator John McCain is seen by voters as far less likely to bring change to Washington than Senator Barack Obama. He is widely viewed as a “typical Republican” who would continue or expand President Bush’s policies.

Congress’s investigation of the Justice Department is of the utmost importance. It now seems clear that the department, under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, operated as a partisan political actor, using its prosecutorial authority to help the party in power win elections. That was a grave abuse, which undermined American democracy.

Carly Fiorina, the woman John McCain sent out to defend Sarah Palin and rip anyone who calls her a tabula rasa on foreign policy and the economy, admitted Tuesday that Palin was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard. That’s pretty damning coming from Fiorina, who also was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.

With economic conditions worsening over the course of this year and voter anxiety on the rise, Senator McCain has had to labor to get past the impression — fostered by his own admissions that the subject is not his strongest suit — that he lacks the experience and understanding to address the nation’s economic woes.