To wit, what’s Palin’s “primary math” and best strategy to gain the GOP nomination in 2012?  After crunching, re-distributing, and maybe massaging and nudging available numbers – chiefly exit poll and fundraising results – Silver ranks all 50 states from Palin’s best to worst, then compares them to a prospective GOP primary calendar.  He bottom-lines her appeal in the following terms:

Palin’s strengths, roughly speaking, lie in a diagonal belt that stretches from the northwest corner of the country through the Deep South; she may not do particularly well in the Northeast and the Southwest.

He then drafts prospective strategic plans for Palin and compares them to ones for known contenders and possible dark horses, finally reaching conclusions that I suspect will shock no one:  Palin’s got paths, but obstacles; Mitt Romney’s got possibly clearer paths, but obstacles; Mike Huckabee could cause a lot of trouble and to Palin in particular, beginning in Iowa, but he may be too much a regional candidate to have any clear path to final victory (additionally, the primary calendar may make it difficult for a Southern candidate to build momentum).  …And we don’t know enough about anyone else to say much about them…

In short, Silver’s analysis seems to suggest that Palin has a real chance, but can’t be counted the clear favorite.  He takes her more seriously than others have, and he begins by observing that he’s thinks she will run.  At the same time, he’s envisioning a conventional race.  In other words, whether or not you think he’s overlooking Palin’s current and potential strengths, he overlooks the conditions that offer both Palin’s main chance as well as her main justification for running and possibly her main hope of accomplishing very much:  The prospect of 2012  being a “sweep the pieces off the board” election, not the traditional chess match.  In anything short of a second American civil war, Silver’s calculations may still be somewhat suggestive, but, with two more years of development roughly along current lines – Obama failing and flailing, Palin and the Tea Party on the rise, the center shifted decisively right and even more decisively anti-business as usual – Palin’s path may look a lot different from one marked out by ’08 exit polls and other inherently backward-looking indicators.  Call this the “Perot Squared” scenario, or maybe “Twilight of the Liberal-Progressive Gods.”

It’s understandable that an Obama supporter who’s gained notoriety as a numbers guy would discount the likelihood of such a turn of events:  There’s no way to turn it up in the numbers – because nothing quite like it has ever happened. It would represent the extension, possibly the culmination, of a broad historical process, not a familiar repetition of the usual four-year cycle.  Any arguably similar events taken from American or world history will be, to say the least, resistant to direct statistical conversion.

On a deeper level, it’s got to be much more comforting to Nate Silver
and his political allies to imagine that by 2012 American politics will
have reverted to the recent historical norm, and such a presumption may
also lend comfort to those Republicans who might prefer a more
traditional candidate than the thrilla from Wasilla – though for the
latter group it probably shouldn’t.  Among other things, it tends to
imply the likely re-election of the incumbent president.  In the
meantime, the same factors that lead Silver or anyone else to take
Palin seriously have to throw calculations like his into doubt.

Glancing at the title of an Andrew Sullivan post – “One Last Word” – linked at Memeorandum Saturday night, I knew it had to be about Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Nation keynote speech.

My guess was that he’d gotten busy yesterday, summoning his personal Palin demons and holding a tea party of his own with them.  Considering the infernal depths of his Palin obsession, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was his 10th post of the day on her.  Nor would I have been surprised if it had been even more foully offensive, deluded, and craven than the most recent previous piece of his I happened to see excerpted, one in which he went on as usual about things he doesn’t understand and that only he and said demons take seriously regarding Palin and her infant son Trig.

I confess, however, that the title made me hope, just a little, that Sullivan had finally done the right thing:  Take an extended, indefinite leave of absence, possibly involving intensive psychotherapy and spiritual counseling – leaving “One Last Word” as his farewell – but, no, as expected, the post turned out to be about Palin.  Oddly enough, however, it was something that a Palin supporter might actually enjoy – assuming an ability to read between the lines of Sullivan’s obscene melodrama and paranoid bigotry.

Promising to assess Palin as a potential presidential candidate, Sullivan first stretches for familiar “conservatives = Nazis” tropes of the sort that the invocation of “Godwin’s Law” was once meant to banish from web conversation, among other things equating Palin’s criticism of Obama as commander-in-chief with the Hitlerian “stab in the back” attack on the post-World War I German left:  Hitler accusing the German left of treason and losing the Great War = raising questions about Obama Administration detainee treatment policy.  Put simply:  In the Sulliverse, any criticism of the great and wonderful Ø’s war leadership = Nazism.

Sullivan then turns to the good stuff:  an at least somewhat grounded analysis of Palin as potential presidential candidate:

…there is a huge constituency out there (rightly) outraged by Washington corruption and she now has the critical mantle of the rogue outsider; she can channel Christianism and fuse it with the slogans of phony “fiscal conservatism”; she will blame every lost job on Obama; and she will accuse him of betraying the troops and befriending America’s enemies. Behind her are the Cheneyites.

Above all, she is capable of generating a personality cult – much, much more so than Obama, because she can harness Christianism to her divine destiny. The power of this kind of appeal – of a charismatic, beautiful woman, an icon of the pro-life cause, persecuted by the evil elites, demonized by libruls, and commanding the biggest military on earth – should not in my view be under-estimated.

Know fear.

It might almost be worth translating the above paragraphs into sane, but I suspect that anyone who has read this far can play that game at home.  Conservatives, and sufficiently numerous members of the American electorate for conservatives to win elections, have become rather adept at exegesis of this type.   This ain’t complicated.  These aren’t the historico-political allegories embedded in The Lord of the Rings or Revelation, and conservatives can fall back on nearly 50 years of practice, since “libruls” have been reflexively painting conservatives as “extremists,” and shouting “The end is near!” at least since the anti-Goldwater campaign of 1964 – when a single famous line of Goldwater’s, and the liberals’ own epochal political success, helped to fuse the terms “conservative” and “extremist” together in the liberal mind and Democrat playbook.

Sullivan’s fear-mongering, literal fear-mongering, itself seems a bit frightening in the larger context of politicized Palin hatred – it only takes a Sullivan with a gun to make this psychosis real -  but too little he says in general makes enough sense for anything he says in particular to be taken very seriously. For the same reason, it may be too much to attribute balanced judgment to Sullivan regarding Palin’s political potential.  Still, I think he’s right that Palinism has immense potential.  But anyone can see that now.

We’re left to pray, perhaps to our “Christianist” God – why not? – that Sullivan and his followers keep to themselves with their pathetic emotionalism.  It would be a shame if they hurt anyone, even themselves.  Otherwise, people so wounded in spirit and intellect have little to offer and are not themselves much to be afraid of.

They don’t count for much, but their collective fear does smell a bit like victory for the taking…

* * *

One last note:  “One Last Word” wasn’t a last word, at all, naturally.  Today, Sullivan is “talking to the hand,” along with a circle of like-minded bloggers (if “minded” can ever be the right word with these people) about notes that Palin may have inked into her palm for the Q&A session at Tea Party Nation last night.  I hope that the nutroots continue to push this absurdly and indicatively trivial line of attack, since it makes Palin look like just what she is – refreshingly human and informal, determined to get the job done – and incidentally reminds everyone about which leading politician (if “leading” can be used in this context) is truly reliant on external devices to express himself, word by wearisome word.

Furthermore, you can’t bring up this event without bringing up those three main points, on all of which Palin, the Tea Party, and conservatives have much more popular positions than the HuffPo and ThinkProgress and Daily Dish left.  It’s free publicity for the Palin program every virtual second it’s discussed and re-transmitted.

If the pseudo-scandal becomes widely enough known, we may someday see crowds of everyday Americans inking such useful reminders – “energy,” “taxes,” “lift America’s spirits” – into their hands, and proudly waving them at Palin rallies, or photographing and t-shirting them.  The first example I’ve seen of such spin-offs was linked at HotAir by commenter Emperor Norton, and is shown at the top of this post.

Like Sullivan’s frightwig of a commentary, what this micro-controversy says to me is that she’s got them in the palm of her hand, she’s crushing them, and there’s not much they seem able to do about it.  They can’t help it.  The more they struggle, the worse it is for them.  You almost have to wonder if they like it that way…

Political news continues to dominate in . . .

JULY

. . . when Sarah Palin unexpectedly announces that she will not complete her term as elected governor of Alaska, explaining, in a prepared statement, that she has a hair appointment. Asked by reporters if she plans to seek the Republican presidential nomination, she replies, “You leave my personal life out of this.” Elsewhere in state politics, the FBI arrests pretty much every elected official in New Jersey on suspicion of being New Jersey elected officials.

On Independence Day the nation takes a welcome break from its worries to celebrate in traditional fashion with barbecues, parades and — as night falls — spectacular aerial North Korean missile detonations.

In government news, top Washington thinkers, looking for a way to goose the economy along, come up with the “Cash for Clunkers” program, under which the federal government provides a financial inducement for people to take functional cars, which are mostly American-made, to car dealers, who deliberately destroy these cars and sell the people new replacement cars, which are mostly foreign-made. This program, which was budgeted for $1 billion, ends up costing $3 billion and is halted after a month. The administration declares that it has been a huge success, which everybody understands to mean that it will never, ever be repeated. With this mission accomplished, the top Washington thinkers are free to train all of their brainpower on the nation’s health-care system.

Then again…

“Dave Barry’s year in review: 2009″ – Entertainment – MiamiHerald.com