Obama benefits in having Palin as his foil

American voters have for decades now sent their presidents to Washington in hopes of delivering some mortal blow to the status quo. Once in office, it’s hard for any president to fully embody the reform that a restive electorate may have hoped for. But it’s considerably easier if you can contrast yourself with an adversary who embodies the kind of outdated politics, ideological rigidity or divisiveness that repelled those voters in the first place.

Promises are always broken, because they are unrealistic, made in campaigns when hyperbole and disingenuousness are standard

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.