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 But it’s considerably easier if you can contrast yourself with an adversary who embodies the kind of outdated politics, ideological rigidity or divisiveness that repelled those voters in the first place.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.

Internecine warfare

After ripping Sarah Palin, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski isn’t mincing words about another one of her high-profile GOP critics: South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint. “I think some of the Republicans in the Congress feel pretty strongly that he and his actions potentially cost us the majority by encouraging candidates that ended up not being electable,” Murkowski told POLITICO outside her Senate office. “And I think Delaware is a pretty good example of that, and I think there’re some folks that feel that DeMint’s actions didn’t necessarily help the Republican majority.”

“So the real question is, what’s his desire?” she said. “Does he want to help the Republican majority, or is he on his own agenda, his own initiative?” Asked what she believed the answer was, Murkowksi said: “I think he’s out for his own initiative.”

Let the fighting continue.

Sarah Palin says she can defeat President Obama Just which Republican aspirant is going to just let her walk into the nomination?