The wild popularity of Sarah Palin

By Michael J.W. Stickings

No, not really.

A new CBS poll fings that her favorable rating is just 22 percent. (That's late-second-term, Iraq-is-a-quagmire, the-economy-is-tanking Bush-Cheney territory.) Even among Republicans, her favorable rating is poor, at just 44 percent. Teabaggers love her, of course, but such low favorable ratings, along with an unfavorable rating of 48 percent, suggest that she is not just a divisive figure but that she is popular only on the extremist right, where of course she fits in comfortably. And while the GOP is certainly moving more and more to the right, with what was once the extreme becoming more and more the mainstream, it appears unlikely that Republicans will allow her to lead them. Even in an extremist right-wing party, after all, she turns a lot of people off.