It’s amusing to me that people think Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012 if McCain loses. Her favorable/unfavorable numbers in the new CBS/NYT poll are 32 percent favorable/41 percent unfavorable. That’s where Hillary Clinton and Al Gore were in early 2007 after 15+ years of negative press. By contrast, Palin has been in the public eye for less than two months. I find it hard to believe that GOP primary voters would see her as the person they think can defeat Barack Obama.

Update 10/15 2:28 PM: Matthew Yglesias comments:

Maybe so. It’s striking to me, though, that explicit “electability” arguments don’t seem to feature heavily in GOP presidential primaries. This is a huge contrast from the Democratic side, where both the 2004 and 2008 primaries ended up showing a heavy focus on those questions. All signs are that a lot of conservatives like Palin just fine. If she can connect with a donor base, it seems to me that she’d be a reasonably strong primary contender. She’d have the leg up, meanwhile, of being better-known nationwide at this point than just about any other eligible Republican.

The problem with this logic, however, is that the Democrats haven’t had an incumbent president since 1996. Isaac Chotiner at TNR makes the point I was planning to make:

Democrats chose an “electable” Democrat in 1992 after having lost three straight presidential elections. In 2000, the Republicans had been out of the White House for eight years and chose someone who sure looked electable (Bush may not have been as popular as McCain, but he was way ahead of Gore in the spring of 2000). Then, in 2004, Democrats were desperate to win back the presidency and nominated someone that was perceived as being more electable than Howard Dean. This year, Republicans may not have talked much about electability during the primary season, but it seems probable that after four years of an Obama administration, that will change.