Even in defeat Sarah Palin continues to make headlines. In New York the journalistic chatter is about who paid for her shopping sprees and just how little she actually knew about the world. (I find it a stretch, though, to believe she thought Africa was a single country).
Palin has become a proxy for the debate over the future of the GOP. Those who want the party to return to the centre, concentrate on re-establishing its reputation for competence and become a national party again see Palin as the problem. (They worry about how well she could do in the Iowa caucus with its very socially conservative electorate and some argue she needs to be disqualified now for the good of the party which explains just how vicious the briefing wars already are.) While those who think that the party needs to be more conservative, rally its base and fight harder think she might she be the solution.
There is a telling anecdote in Newsweek’s instant campaign history about how at a rally Palin refused to go on stage with a Republican Senator because he was pro-choice and a Congressional candidate because he opposed drilling in Alaska. This seems to embody the kind of rump thinking that sections of the Republican Party and the right-wing media have fallen into in recent years. If the Republicans want to demand this kind of ideological purity, they are going to be out of power for a very long time.
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