Palin following in Shrub Bush's footsteps

Frank Rich rightly warns both Democratic leaders and GOP establishment insiders not to write off Palin:

With Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity on her side, Palin hardly needs the grandees of the so-called Republican establishment. They know it and flail at her constantly. Politico reported just before Election Day that unnamed “party elders” were nearly united in wanting to stop her, out of fear that she’d win the nomination and then be crushed by Obama. Their complaints are seconded daily by Bush White House alumni like Karl Rove, Michael Gerson, and Mark McKinnon, who said recently that Palin’s “stock is falling and pretty rapidly now” and that “if she’s smart, she does not run.”

This is either denial or wishful thinking. The same criticisms that the Bushies fling at Palin were those once aimed at Bush: a slender résumé, a lack of intellectual curiosity and foreign travel, a lazy inclination to favor from-the-gut improvisation over cracking the briefing books. These spitballs are no more likely to derail Palin within the G.O.P. than they did him.

And, like Bush, if we're not careful, the country would again suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations

That said, it is with Obama, too - including the soft bigotry of his being "articulate" because, to many white Volvo liberals, he didn't sound like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.