Sarah Palin is Mitt Romney’s Useful Idiot

The glib answer to this is to suggest that she’d do the party a great service by not running at all. Yesterday I wrote that she’s a “wrecker not a uniter” and that she could hijack the primary season to disastrous effect. That’s clearly one possibility. But there are others, including some which might actually help the GOP and not merely by demonstrating the limits of Palinism and, consequently, lancing that particular boil.

Though I think he under-estimates Palin’s fund-raising potential, Daniel Larison runs through some of the that make it most unlikely that Palin can actually win the GOP nomination. And as Daniel says, right now the most probable beneficiary of a Palin candidacy is our old friend Shameless Mitt Romney.

Until now Romney has been tacking towards the nationalist base. But Mitt’s not very good at phoney populism and it shows.