Palin exits for now, Boehner ascendant

Sarah Palin's resignation as Governor of Alaska was unexpected. By God she is independent, so there you have it. She can make money with a book and on television or radio, or she can run a grass roots campaign for the 2012 Republican nomination, or she can really get back at the Republican establishment and run as an independent, or threaten to do so. Who knows. She's an action person, a vindictive wild person, an attractive charmer, and an Alaskan family person with all that apparently entails, and she is not a policy or process or information based person. She's made her statement and it's believable when she says that she "does not know what's next". What's next is something that would not have been remotely possible without John McCain's decision in September 2008.

That she could have been a leader of the Republican party was unlikely. There's been much media speculation about who the leaders of the Republicans really are, a default to Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gringrich?, but that's absurd. The real leader at the moment is John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, who opposes everything the Obama administration proposes and brings the votes to back it up. He comes across as tough, stubborn, unyielding, and highly political, but he does not come off as a resentful whiner like Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader. Boehner seems to be driven equally by Republican principles, someone define please, and an intense hatred for Nancy Pelosi, favor of course returned.

A lifelong native of southwest Ohio, otherwise known as the buttoned-down conservative Cincinnati area, Boehner has not historically been a favorite of the religious conservatives or xenophobes of his party. He has tended to favor business over orthodoxy. Now he is completely and totally ruled by an anti-anything-Obama approach. He does represent the fading Republican party in a way that could work with their transition from exploiting "values" fears over religion, abortion, guns, immigration, and gays, to being a resurgent party that bizarrely wants to recast itself as populist, standing up for the little guy against Wall Street and exploitive big business as well as against big government.

At the moment he's smart enough to not seek the role of Republican leader or do anything to suggest an interest. He's too intense, however, to be unaware of his potential within his party.