Our political Quote of the Day comes from MSNBC’s First Read, commenting on Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s historical win as a write in candidate, resulting in her re-election despite opposition from nemesis Sarah Palin:
*** “Poke in the eye” to Palin: The AP writes that Lisa Murkowski’s apparent victory yesterday “was a political poke in the eye” to Sarah Palin. The reason: Palin “and her husband, Todd, invested far more time and money for Joe Miller” than any other candidate and Miller losing to a write-in candidate really “was a rebuke for Palin on her home turf by voters who know her best” and “an embarrassment as Palin considers a White House bid.” Here’s another way to look at it: These elections taught us what we already knew — that Palin wields influence in Republican primaries, but that it is limited beyond a fairly narrow base, even in her home state.
I’ve added the boldface at the end. That has been one of our key points at TMV: Palin is making very little effort to go beyond her existing constituency. This means that if she wins the GOP nomination and the election (and naysayers who say it “can’t” happen seem to believe that the conventional wisdom is somehow always correct when it has been wrong many times, partially due to intervening factors) she would be a President strictly of the base (the part of the party she already has), for the base and by the base coming into office with virtually no safety net of residual support.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.