Steve Kornacki

Sarah Palin is a living, breathing Rorschach test. It doesn’t really matter what she says or does: her fans and critics will see whatever they want to see.

So when she suddenly quit as Alaska’s governor on Friday, the analyses about what it all meant were decisive, predictable and mostly wrong.

The critics, when they weren’t speculating that a massive scandal would soon be unearthed to explain Palin’s hasty exit, proclaimed Palin’s move an act of political suicide that would ruin whatever hopes she has of mounting a credible presidential campaign in 2012.

The best example came from Bruce Reed, an old Bill Clinton adviser, who

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Jerry Brown’s career serves as a four-decade testament to the idea that politics is a means to a means. Every time he gains an office, he almost immediately sets out to parlay it into a new one.

Which is why the prospect of his return (after a 28-year absence) to California’s governorship next year is so fascinating. At 72 years old, he’ll be too old to shoot for a higher office. For the first time in his life, he’ll have to devote himself entirely to the job he was elected to.   

Just consider Brown’s career to date.

At 32 years of age, he won election in 1970 as California’s secretary of state—and promptly set about positioning himself for the governor’s race in 1974, which he won.

Senate Democrats responded to their potentially momentous acquisition of a 60th member on Tuesday by asking what the big deal is.

 “It’s not a real 60,” Majority Leader Harry Reid said just after Al Franken finally emerged as the winner in Minnesota’s drawn-out Senate race.

In a matter of hours, it became clear that Reid wasn’t just saying what he was supposed to say: As if on cue, Joe Lieberman used a health care forum in New Haven on Tuesday night to blast the “public option” at the heart of Barack Obama’s health care reform agenda.

From Todd S. Purdum’s new Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin:

When aides went to load McCain’s concession speech into the teleprompter, they found a concession speech for Palin—written by Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully, who had also been the principal drafter of her convention speech—already on the system. Schmidt and Salter told Palin that there was no tradition of Election Night speeches by running mates, and that she wouldn’t be giving one. Palin was insistent. “Are those John’s wishes?” she asked. They were, she was told. But Palin took the issue to McCain himself, raising it on the walk from his suite to the outdoor rally.

With mounting apprehension and frustration, many of Barack Obama’s supporters and sympathizers are beginning to note the general passivity with which he has treated members of his own party on Capitol Hill.

To be sure, there is plenty of logic behind this posture: the last Democratic president to enjoy majorities in both congressional chambers, Bill Clinton, aggressively inserted himself into the legislative process in his first two years in office only to be undermined by resentful Democrats. The last thing Mr. Obama and his White House team want is a repeat—in terms of both policy results and public opinion—of 1993 and 1994.

The White House made clear on Sunday that Barack Obama will proceed with his push for diplomatic engagement with Iran, no matter the outcome of the current upheaval in the Islamic Republic.

Appearing on several Sunday morning talk shows, Susan Rice, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, and David Axelrod, one of the president’s top advisers, stressed the same basic theme: that this month’s election shouldn’t dissuade the U.S. from trying to resolve the nuclear issue with Iran since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and not the president, is the real decision-maker in Tehran.

“That was the case before the election; it is the case now,” Rice

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Besides Andre Bauer, the South Carolina lieutenant governor who may soon luck into his state’s top job, the biggest beneficiary of Mark Sanford’s sudden fall from grace could actually be the governor of Mississippi.

That would be 61-year-old Haley Barbour, who chaired the Republican National Committee in the mid-1990s and who is plainly interested in seeking the presidency in 2012—which explains why, as news of the Sanford scandal spread yesterday, Barbour was in New Hampshire to speak at a state G.O.P. fundraiser.

The Sanford news will hardly make Barbour the ’12 front-runner, or even a top-tier contender, but it does help him in two key ways.

John McCain has been at his recklessly self-righteous best this past week, assured that he’s “on the right side of history” in trying to bully Barack Obama into inserting himself into the drama in Tehran.

McCain fancies himself a “student of history,” even though he’s apparently never considered the many reasons why it would be disastrous for an American president to loudly declare solidarity with the protesters in Iran—reasons that include, but are not limited to, the United States’ role in overthrowing Iran’s democratically-elected government in 1953 (an event still as palpably felt by Iranians as Kennedy assassination is by Americans), its subsequent quarter-century economic, political and military commitment to the despotic Shah and his hated SAVAK secret police, and its

One of these years, maybe we’ll finally learn: those bulky, detail-rich policy plans that presidential candidates incessantly hype and commentators and their opponents pore over? They don’t matter. At all.

Just consider Barack Obama’s evolution on health care. At the end of May 2007, not long after he announced his candidacy, he unveiled a highly specific plan to make health insurance available to all Americans. It was the product of months of work by a team of impeccably credentialed policy pros and provided plenty of fodder for policy wonks.

“If you are one of 45 million Americans who don't have health insurance, you will after this plan becomes law,” Obama promised at the time.

Barry Blitt

"Nobody really trusts the numbers that come out of Tweed these days."

--Bill Thompson, reacting to new figures announced by City Hall that show the high school graduation rate climbing to a 22-year high of 56.4 percent

As anyone who follows city government--or anyone, even, who has watched an eiposed of The Wire--knows, it's not unheard of for city departments and agencies to "juke the stats" in order to make the mayor look good.

Anyone who has watched an episode of The Wire also knows that pointing this out is futile. When it comes to shaping public opinion, nothing speaks louder than the numbers.