On Tuesday, a remarkable thing happened among the possible contenders for the Republican presidential nomination: Newt Gingrich warned Sarah Palin to be more careful about her incendiary rhetoric.
Yep, you read that right. Newt Gingrich, the king of incendiary rhetoric, champion of rhetorical fireballs, the emperor of verbal excess, cautioned Palin about watching her words. Watch him, interviewed by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:
That’s just one more sign of how worried Republican leaders are about the prospect of a Palin presidential run. Her negatives are climbing; a recent poll gives her an unfavorable rating of 53 percent, the highest disapproval she has scored since John McCain chose her as his running mate. A long line of establishment Republicans, including Barbara Bush and Karl Rove, have suggested that she should not run. Ross Douthat, conservative columnist for The New York Times, insists that the news media should stop talking about her :
To the media: Cover Sarah Palin if you want, but stop acting as if she’s the most important conservative politician in America. Stop pretending that she has a plausible path to the presidency in 2012. (She doesn’t.) Stop suggesting that she’s the front-runner for the Republican nomination. (She isn’t.)
That’s clearly the wish of establishment conservatives. But the former half-term governor has made it clear that she’s “not going to sit down and shut up.”
OK. She’s giving President Obama just what he wants. According to The NYT:
But as the new House majority begins its push this week to scale back the Obama agenda, it seems that the president now has, in Ms. Palin, something he badly needed after a punishing election season: the ideal political foil.
In a new poll from ABC News and The Washington Post, only 30 percent of respondents approved of Ms. Palin’s highly publicized response to the shootings that gravely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others, while 46 percent said they disapproved. By contrast, 78 percent approved of how President Obama handled the incident, compared with just 12 percent who did not.
But since the first minutes after the shootings, Ms. Palin (and not Mr. Boehner) has again been the most-talked-about Republican in the country. And Ms. Palin represents exactly the kind of culturally conservative critique of Mr. Obama that her Washington colleagues would like very much to play down at the moment. Her grievances are based less in the particulars of policy than they are in the caricatures and cultural divisions of the last political era — effete Easterners versus rugged Westerners, wine-drinkers versus beer-pounders, Ivy League lawyers versus Bible-brandishing activists.
