According to a bipartisan chorus — right, center-right, and liberal — the victory of Christine O’Donnell in Delaware’s primary proves that the race for the Republican nomination in 2012 is no longer wide open, because Sarah Palin is officially the front-runner. This strikes me as bunkum for many of the reasons that Ramesh Ponnuru and Daniel Larison discuss, and especially for this one: It is extremely unlikely that the political landscape in the winter and spring of 2012 will resemble the political landscape in the autumn of 2010. Even setting aside the unpredictability of economic developments, foreign-policy crises, and everything else that could shift the ground beneath our feet, the reality of having a more empowered Republican Party in Washington and a weaker President Obama in the White House will almost certainly work profound changes on the country’s mood — and yes, in the mood of the Republican base as well. (It’s hard to be quite so fired up and furious about socialism when Washington is mired in gridlock, and it’s hard to be quite so outraged at RINO perfidy when you’ve kicked a lot of the RINOs out of office.) The temper of conservative politics in the fall of 1994, the off-year election cycle that most resembles this one (it was a year, as Rich Lowry notes, when a former homeless man defeated the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee), bore little resemblance to the temper of conservative politics in 1996, when Bob Dole cruised to the Republican nomination over more base-pleasing candidates like Pat Buchanan and Phil Gramm. And while it’s likely that the Tea Parties will lend a greater resilience to the present anti-establishment spirit, 12-t0-18 months of divided government will almost certainly have a dampening effect on the impulses that carried Christine O’Donnell to victory.
This isn’t to say Sarah Palin couldn’t be the nominee, though it still strikes me as unlikely. (She’ll probably need more than 41 percent of self-described conservatives to describe her as ready for the presidency, to begin with.) But trying to draw lessons for the long, hard primary slog to come from a single midterm race strikes me as the definition of a fool’s errand.