Who do you WANT to win the GOP nomination?

[Mr. Morden]

I don't think the current polls really mean that much anyway, except in that they show that there is no one person dominating the 2012 field.  It's too early to read more into it than that.  In assessing Palin's chances, I don't really look to the current polls as much as I just make a predictive judgment of how well I think she'd hold up in a national campaign.

On that score, I don't think she'd do well, as I think she's a gaffe machine, she has no significant support from the GOP establishment and is unlikely to get any any time soon, she's supremely vulnerable on the experience issue and would have to defend against the charge that she quit halfway through her term as governor for no apparent reason, and she's got this 19 year old kid running around the country telling tabloid stories about her family and taking her to court over custody of her grandson.

Now, if she was 40 or 50 points ahead of Romney and everyone else in the polls (a la Bob Dole circa late 1994 / early 1995), then *maybe* I'd think that she has a chance at overcoming all of that, but the polls just show that it's anyone's ball game, and I don't see her as being a player who's up to the task.

[Mr. Morden]

Wallace did OK in terms of how he handled personal questions, like double standards over the use of the word "retarded".  But all of the policy questions were paper thin, and he never really challenged the premises of her answers.  The closest you get to a tough question in a Chris Wallace interview is something like "Don't you think President Obama deserves some credit for the recovering economy?"

But then, most of the rest of the media isn't much better in this regard, so there's no point in singling out Wallace.