Is Sarah Palin Popular?

"The Reformers who seem to want to destroy Sarah Palin are picking an incredibly self-destructive fight for the simple reason that, as a political matter, Palin is popular and they aren't (How many divisions does David Brooks have?). Rather, they should be fighting to win Palin and Palin supporters to their cause."

Jonah Goldberg

Fellow National Review contributors Kathleen Parker and Christopher Buckley found the Palin pick unacceptable. Parker wrote, "If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself."

As for Goldberg's claim of Palin's popularity, a recent NBC News/">Wall Street Journal poll tells a different story.

Believe Palin is qualified? 55% no, 40% yes

Palin favorables: 38% positive, 47% negative.

Goldberg reads news reports and polls every day. He still refuses to believe that Palin is unpopular. The Goldberg conservatives are the reasons the GOP is in trouble.

National Review Staffers Turn On McCain

Christopher Buckley is the son of National Review founder and conservative icon William Buckley. Christopher Buckley shocked the conservative world by endorsing Barack Obama.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

After the endorsement was posted on the Daily Beast, Buckley resigned from the National Review.

In related news: NR columnist Kathleen Parker called VP candidate Sarah Palin as "Clearly Out Of Her League" and needs to step down. Stephen Colbert asked Parker if she was voting for McCain. Parker would not say yes.