As death flutters around the back-yard deck of Senator John McCain, it’s sad to read reports that the scrappy Sandcutter regrets picking Governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate and wishes he had instead picked Senator Jos. Lieberman. The only person diminished by this kind of talk is Senator McCain himself, and the heroic Arizonan deserves better.

Not that we lack for love of Mr. Lieberman. The Sun was the first newspaper to sketch the rationale for Mr. McCain to bring in Mr. Lieberman as his running mate. That was in an enthusiastic editorial called “The Logic of Lieberman.” We issued it shortly after Mr. Lieberman delivered at the Commentary dinner a speech that left us with the view that as a running mate he’d be “fabulous.”

That was in May 2008. In August, Mr. McCain turned to Mrs. Palin. We were thrilled with that choice, too, calling it a “brilliant pick.” We’ve never abandoned that opinion (nor, until the latest reports, had Mr. McCain). As the campaign faltered, our view was that it was because of the kinds of errors that could be laid only to the candidate at the top of the ticket.

We marked that on September 5, 2008, in “Wrong-Way McCain.” It rued the way the Senator was running against the “tobacco companies” and “drug companies” and kvetching about the oil companies. For that we needed a Republican? Most of all, he was running away from President George W. Bush the way Vice President Gore fled President Clinton.

At rallies all across red state America, Mrs. Palin outdrew the leader of the ticket by a factor five to one. Her own error was undercutting her populist message with a divisive démarche about “real Americans.” The tragedy is that pro-growth, inclusive, capitalism was waiting for both of them to embrace. Mrs. Palin understands it better than many in the GOP, including Mr. McCain.

This became increasingly evident after the Republican defeat. Mrs. Palin understood energy better than any leading Republican. She was the only Republican prepared to reach out to organized labor (she herself, like Ronald Reagan, had once carried a union card). Most importantly, by our lights, Mrs. Palin was the first Republican to breach for monetary reform.

The alert Alaskan did that on the eve of the G-20 summit in Seoul Korea in 2010, when she challenged the then-chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, over quantitative easing. Mrs. Palin also displayed an amazing knack for spotting — and boosting — winning Republicans, including, it would turn out, the dark horse who would become America’s 45th president.

Not that Mrs. Palin shrank from criticizing President Trump either. When he coaxed Carrier into keeping its jobs in Ohio, Mrs. Palin called it “crony capitalism” and warned, using her way with words, that the invisible hand of the market could get “amputated.” She was a backer of Mr. Trump, but no yes-woman. We have no doubt that she paid a price for her backbone.

Mrs. Palin showed character in reacting to the reports of Mr. McCain’s regrets. She said the reports felt like “a perpetual gut punch.” And of the senator’s complaint, she said: “That’s not what Sen. McCain has told me all these years.” So far as we can tell, she’s never said an ill-word about the man who lifted her to glory, however fleeting. She’s always called Mr. McCain the hero that he is.