Free Republic

<p>Bill Kristol, the influential Weekly Standard editor, is a famously opportunistic pundit. So it's very bad news for Sarah Palin that even Kristol appears to have given up on a Palin presidential campaign this year.</p> <p>Kristol went out of his way on MSNBC this morning to express disappointment with Palin, a striking shift for a man who has been Palin's most prominent champion in the press since he met her on a cruise in Alaska in 2007.</p>

As Republicans consider their presidential options for 2012, they ought to discard two dangerously misleading pieces of conventional wisdom: that Sarah Palin and her tea party supporters represent a triumphant, even dominant force in American politics, and that more centrist, veteran GOP officeholders exert little appeal to the electorate. National results in the last two election cycles conclusively disprove both assumptions: Palin's power as king (or queen) maker in 2010 produced spotty, unreliable results. And Sen. John McCain ran a stronger race and drew more votes in 2008 than outspoken conservatives who shared the GOP ballot with him.........

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del.— Soon after Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski lost her August primary and became the latest casualty of the tea party’s assault on the GOP establishment, she placed a call to Rep. Mike Castle, another Republican Party favorite facing an insurgent challenger. Her message? “They'll come at you hard, so just be prepared," Castle told POLITICO. Murkowski’s warning proved prescient and her experience instructive. While her defeat at the hands of tea party-backed challenger Joe Miller reverberated across the country, nowhere did it have more impact than in tiny Delaware, where Castle once looked to be a runaway winner...