But as McCain and Palin wrapped up their first weekend as a team, it was clear the campaign had changed focus. Palin represents the culmination of a weeks-long search for the best way to blunt Obama's themes of hope and change.
And Palin has quickly been thrust from political obscurity into a starring role.
At the Minnesota State Fair, a hub of political culture in this battleground state, the McCain campaign booth was adorned with a large color portrait of the Alaska governor. There was no comparable McCain photo in sight.
And, while top Republicans such as President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney canceled their scheduled appearances tonight at the Republican National Convention, Palin was dispatched to Minnesota at the last minute to rally the party. The symbolism was clear: Palin, a national newcomer, was now a standard-bearer for the party.
"They had to pivot away from experience," said Republican consultant John Weaver, a former McCain advisor. "In a change election, they have to give that up now."
As recently as Wednesday, in the midst of the Democratic National Convention, a McCain television ad dismissed Obama as "dangerously unprepared to be president." But by this weekend, McCain senior advisor Charles Black was downplaying the idea that experience had ever been a central McCain theme. "We never used experience as the big argument," he said.
And Sunday in St. Paul, the site of this week's Republican National Convention, House GOP leader John A. Boehner dismissed the importance of experience.
"We've all started new jobs from time to time in our career," he said. "And most of you can remember the first day that you spent on almost every one of those new jobs. Because when you got it, you thought, 'Oh my God, how am I going to do this?'
"Nobody's qualified on the first day," he continued. "I don't care whether it's Barack Obama or whether it's John McCain sitting in the White House."
McCain, despite more than a year of casting himself as the best-prepared to be commander in chief, used a Fox News interview to describe the nationally unknown Palin as his "soul mate" for her work as a reformer in Alaska.
"In all due respect to my friends [who think] that she has never been on some of the inside-the-Beltway activities, I say thank God," McCain said.
