G. Frink's

Poor Palin.

There were hints to Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin that she was being pranked by a caller purporting to be France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

There was a fake adviser name early on, a truly odd reference to the joy of killing, the inappropriately pornographic references to Sarkozy's wife and so on. Yet Palin gushed embarrassingly along as though the goofy, fake-French accent of Canadian comedian Marc-Antoine Audette were real. At one point she even told him, fan-like, "We love you!"

Her own failings aside, Palin should never have had to field the call at all. As Lawerence O'Donnell put it in an MSNBC interview, "Sarah Palin has the worst campaign staff around her in modern campaign history."

They can all join the very large, circular firing squad of McCain/Palin advisers which has begun forming.

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama will win the presidency by a comfortable margin and will turn North Carolina blue for the first time since Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976.

Democrat Kay Hagan will win the U.S. Senate contest with incumbent Republican Liddy Dole, who plunged her campaign deep into the gutter with vilely misleading attack ads.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beverly Perdue will edge out Republican Pat McCrory to become North Carolina's first female governor.

The North Carolina General Assembly will become more Democratic, not less.