In response to Chris Cilizza, Ross Douthat lays out two possible options for Sarah Palin’s political future—the first being a presidential run in 2012, which he argues would be fraught with complications, and the other a run in 2016 or 2020, for which she’ll have a decade or so to mature as a leader and rebrand herself politically.

Douthat clearly leans toward the latter tack:

Meanwhile, she can hoard her political capital, campaign for GOP candidates in 2010 and 2012 and create a generation of office-holders who owe her, and spend some time reintroducing herself to the American public in a less-partisan context. What Edwards did with poverty, she could do with education or health care or some other issue where the GOP is weak - and better still, she could get involved in overseas charity work, and spend a lot of time shuttling around the Middle East and Africa with Rick Warren and Bono, helping widows and orphans and AIDS patients, occasionally meeting foreign leaders, and filling up the back pages of her passport. Next thing you know, she’ll have Nick Kristof plugging her in his columns, and Bill Clinton praising her at goodwill dinners (not that he wouldn’t anyway), and the ladies from The View having her on to chat about her charity work - and she’ll refuse to talk politics, thank you very much, and although the base will still love her, the days when she spent all her time attacking Barack Obama and fumbling through nightly-news interviews will be long forgotten. And then - then - in 2016 or 2020, she’ll run for President, and as long as some rising half-Hispanic GOP star doesn’t come along to play Obama to her Hillary, the rest will be history.

The trouble with this is that it runs counter to Palin’s disposition. Palin is not the Hillary Clinton type, cautious and deliberative, a public figure whose political vision extends out over several election cycles.

Rather, Palin is a reformer who stumbled into politics with all the urgency of a moral crusader. That zealousness has propelled her to this point, and will fuel her at least through 2010 (assuming she avoids difficult interviews and makes no major gaffes over the next month).

But ultimately her moral zeal, which to this point has proven her greatest asset, lies starkly at odds with the kind of strategic patience she will need to remain atop the GOP.  The same myopia that has allowed her to brush off critics and foes alike has, at the same time, made it difficult for her to undertake the kind of long term thinking that Douthat advocates.

Which is why Palin will prove to be a flash in the pan in presidential terms, with at most a frenzied run in 2012. Beyond that she’ll serve as little more than a cultural flashpoint, a telegenic face the news orgs can turn to anytime they’re particularly desperate to boost ratings. 

Nate Silver has some interesting thoughts today on McCain’s bailout gambit.

McCain’s basic mistake, according to Silver, was that he confused tragedy and crisis:

What I think McCain also might have done, however, is to confuse slightly different things: a tragedy and a crisis. In a tragedy—say, a terrorist attack, or a Category 5 hurricane hitting a major American city—people expect the political process to be put on hold. That’s not to say there aren’t political implications to such things—decisions to be made, lessons to be learned. But those are the moments where we hope to come together as a country. Imagine if a politican were to run an attack ad during Hurricane Katrina—this would seem completely inappropriate.

The financial tremors on Wall Street, however, were not a tragedy, but a crisis: an ongoing, slowly building, relatively forseeable event, but perhaps one lacking the acutely emotional impact. In that sense, it was more along the lines of global warming than 9/11. And in a crisis, people do not expect the political process to be put on hold. On the contrary, they expect it to go into overdrive to get them the hell out of the crisis.

A semantic distinction, perhaps, but sometimes semantics have consequences.

How egregious have the latest McCain ads been?

Even Karl Rove thinks they’ve gone to far:

Former Bush adviser Karl Rove said Sunday that Sen. John McCain had gone “one step too far” in some of his recent ads attacking Sen. Barack Obama.

For the record, Rove also criticized Obama’s ads as well.

But it’s nonetheless a telling miscue, the kind of gaffe that can put an entire campaign in context in a way no op-ed column can. 

I was just about to pen a longer piece cataloguing all the reasons Sarah Palin should never be president.

Then I came across Dan Payne’s piece in the Boston Globe yesterday. Let’s just say I don’t have a whole lot to add of my own.

Every now and then Joe Klein unleashes a real gem.

Fortunately for us, his column this week—on the mythology surrounding Sarah Palin—certainly qualifies in that regard. 

Prior to this week, the most telling statistic in the presidential campaign was the voter turnout in the Democratic primary.

County by county and state by state, Democratic turnout consistently dwarfed Republican turnout. Minnesota was particularly revealing: in the very state where the Republicans are set to hold their convention, 214,066 votes were cast in the Dem primary, compared to 62,828 votes for the GOP candidates.

The question was whether the Democratic party could sustain that level of turnout in the general election.

The last two weeks have gone a long way toward answering that. Two stats in particular are all anyone needs to know.

First, according to Nielsen Obama’s speech on Thursday drew slightly more than 40 million viewers. To put that in perspective, not only is that the same draw as the Opening Ceremony of the Atlanta Olympics, but it pretty safely places Obama beyond celebrity. Even A-list celebrities cannot hit 40 million for a televised event. 40 million pretty clearly puts Obama in the category of icon—a personality that doesn’t just tap into the zeitgeist of an age, as all celebrities do, but comes to appear inseparable from it.

Second, 2.9 million. That’s how many text messages the Obama camp sent to announce Biden’s vice presidency.

Think about that number for a minute: most Americans, certainly young ones, do not give their cell phone numbers to anyone other than personal acquaintances. Yet 2.9 million people willingly gave theirs to a politician. Read studies like this, and it goes a long way toward suggesting that voter turnout in the general will remain just as high as in the primaries.

For the Republicans, the two numbers spell trouble. Palin may be photogenic, but Obama is an icon.

As I wrote last night, Obama came into this speech needing to show he could explain and empathize at the same time.

Bill Clinton, masterful as ever, offered him a template for how to do so. And fortunately, Obama more than took it.

Just look at this:

For over two decades, he’s subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy — give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is — you’re on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps — even if you don’t have boots. You’re on your own.

Well it’s time for them to own their failure. It’s time for us to change America.

What Obama is really referring to is the philosophical school of Milton Friedman, also known as the Chicago School of Economics.

In its various iterations there is no shortage of intellectual complexity, yet here Obama reduces it to something anyone can understand—and even more, he communicates that he personally can understand why someone would find that school of thought so discomfiting.

Quotes like that are political rhetoric at its demagogic best; they’re what made Bill Clinton president in 1992 and 1996, and what made Kennedy a legend in 1960.

Now that Obama has fully mastered them, they should make him both.

Wow. Bill Clinton’s speech last night was extraordinary.

Granted, I’m not sure it’s enough to heal the Clinton-Obama rift, or persuade any undecided Hillary supporters.

But on the level of oratory, it was remarkable.

What Clinton lacks in his ability to inspire, he more than makes up for in his ability to explain and, crucially, empathize. He just took the impersonal complexity of global economic system and repackaged it in personal terms, in a language and story anyone could understand.

For all his own rhetorical gifts, that’s a skill Obama has yet to master. In fact, it’s probably his most glaring weakness as a campaigner.

In that sense, Clinton’s speech was more magnanimous than it might appear. It was designed not to show Obama up, but to show him the way—to offer him a textbook example of how to explain and empathize at the same time.

Hopefully Obama was wise enough to take note. He won’t enter the White House unless he learns to do the same thing.

Back during the primaries, when Obama and Clinton were running neck and neck, I had more than a few conversations with friends about who would be the better pick.

My take was always the same: Obama, with his unique mix of public rhetoric and personal biography, would be better for the country; Clinton, with all the foreign goodwill and experience she and her husband could marshall internationally, would be better for the world. I just wasn’t sure which was more important. 

Yet I’d also add that while there was little Clinton could do to grow her base domestically, there was plenty Obama could do to shore up his foreign policy credentials.

Tapping advisers like Samantha Powers was a good start, but as Powers own gaffe demonstrated, Obama needed advisers and officials whose familiarity with foreign policy extended well beyond the academic or theoretical. In short, he needed to explicitly ally himself with someone like Biden—the Senator with the greatest familiarity with Iraq, and a pretty solid grasp of central Asia more generally. If Obama were to publicly tap Biden, I’d say, I would probably fall into his camp.

Of course, that never happened. The Democratic primary was all about America—or rather, about how American liberals wanted to see themselves—and Obama was able to win on that count alone. Save for his Iraq vote, foreign policy never really factored in in a decisive way.

However, as David Axelrod has finally begun to realize, Obama will not be so lucky with the general election. That’s why he went on his speaking tour in June and why he tapped Biden now. Forget what the pundits say: this pick was not about domestic issues, or the so-called blue-collar vote. Look at the electoral map, and this year’s campaign is going to come down to a couple mid-Atlantic states and a handful of Western ones. If Obama can take the right mix of those states, he wins. Biden helps in that regard, but either Bayh or Kaine would have helped more.

Picking Biden was all about foreign policy—about having someone who could hold his own against McCain’s foreign policy credentials in the short run, and even more, about having someone who could help Obama recalibrate American foreign policy once he takes office. (Incidentally, if there’s one thing the media has not talked about enough in this campaign it’s this: the complex political manuevering that will happen in 2010-11, when the US will have to disengage from Iraq without empowering Syria or Iran. That will be the major foreign policy challenge of the next administration; and in that sense Biden’s selection was made more with an eye toward 2012.)

All of which is to say, Biden was a good choice for Obama. Not great, since the same lack of discipline that defeated Biden’s every presidential run could prove a liability once in office.

But certainly a good choice nonetheless.

In the near term, Biden will help to counter McCain’s principal strength. In the long term, he could prove invaluable—should Obama win, the next election will be a referendum on his governance abroad and at home, and Biden’s advice will figure prominently in former.

And there you have it. The Times is now reporting that Russia feels it has done enough:

President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia agreed on Tuesday to the terms of a cease-fire that could end the clashes in Georgia, saying Russia had “punished” Georgia enough for its aggression against the separatist enclave of South Ossetia.

A clear tell in all this is who the news conference was with: French President Nicholas Sarkozy. Bush stayed away, preferring to address the conflict at a cautious remove.

The more I think about it, the more I have to believe that at some point earlier on Moscow sent the Bush administration, and particularly the State department, some kind of signal that it would sign on to the fourth round of sanctions on Iran.

Shy of such an assurance, the US’s actions don’t make sense—or at any rate, without one I have a hard time believing that the Rice camp would have won out over Cheney’s call for more aggressive action.