Joanie Vennochi notes in her surliest tones today...

that Sarah Palin drew a boisterous audience of one thousand up in New Hampshire this week.
This being spiteful Joanie though, she declined to note that Senator Barack Obama spoke at an outdoor rally in Missouri with 100,000 audience members the previous day.

So a thousand...not so much.

There was a time when New Hampshire was a wingnut powerhouse home to some of the gaudiest reactionary superstars in the nation. Theatrical weirdos like Meldrim Thompson the Bruce Springsteen of conservative politics, John Sununu a man who made Karl Rove look like Fred Rogers and of course William Loeb the late publisher of the Manchester Union Leader a daily with a defiantly Falangist outlook...the sort of newspaper that only Roberto Farinacci could love.

Now today...nothing...Palin should have ingathered ten times as many...a thousand simply doesn't impress frankly it seems like pity-numbers if you asked me.

Well what can I say? The sun that dawned on Barry Goldwater and shone down on Ronald Reagan down in Malibu, now dimly sets in the west as Sarah Palin stands over a freshly shot moose on the Alaskan tundra.

Oh now don't get me wrong, win or lose Sarah will be with us for a long time to come, the final inheritors are always a tawdry angry and inescapable lot..."cheated" in their opinion of glory right at the moment of supreme triumph.

Economic catastrophe has unwound those four mutually reinforcing myths that make movement conservatism so strong in the USA, the rugged individualists have been exposed as greedy imbeciles and the small gummint' crowd have finally been fatally compromised by their own lies.
This leaves angry greviance ridden social conservatives in a dangerously exposed position...their baroque theology will seem like malevolent dithering now in the face of an international economic crisis.
Don't laugh, this is the very situation that once confronted the Anti-Saloon League in 1932 and brought a swift end to prohibition in the bargain.
So yes one way or another, Sarah and her myth of christian politics will inherit but it may well be dust and ashes in her mouth, that is if a scandal doesn't finally drag her back into obscurity and that could still be the case as of this writing.
Her big challenge if the GOP loses if whether or not she can fetch the Christian Dominionist remnants and fundraise on that basis, if she can then she will be something akin to a force in national politics going forward. After all few politicians have starved or suffered in this country for preaching sectional hatred...if she can't fundraise off those cohorts than she is headed for Ferraro-ville on a express train.

Right now though, she has the good fortune to be faced with the uptight and priggish Mitt Romney as her chief rival for national leadership a contest that would vaguely resemble a sluggish robot versus Bugs Bunny.
Day by day though, it is getting tougher to be a conservative almost everything they believe is being systematically beaten down by the facts. In that respect, Governor Palin is about to inherit a wasteland.