As I wrote earlier, CNBC primetime host Larry Kudlow donated money to a Republican congressional campaign this cycle. Hosts Gary Kaminsky and David Faber donated to Mitt Romney's PAC and a GOP candidate.

Suze Orman, financial adviser and host of CNBC's "The Suze Orman Show," outdid the other listed NBC Universal personalities (and made CNBC a bit more bipartisan) with two $28,500 donations to the DNC and one $10,000 donation to California's "No on 8" campaign for marriage equality.

Are hosts on the Consumer News and Business Channel held to the same ethical standards as NBC News employees? Are CNBC hosts and contributors not expected to be keep up the appearance of objectivity? If not, why not?

"Anyone working for NBC News who takes part in civic or other outside activities may find that these activities jeopardize his or her standing as an impartial journalist because they may create the appearance of a conflict of interest. Such activities may include participation in or contributions to political campaigns or groups that espouse controversial positions. You should report any such potential conflicts in advance to, and obtain prior approval of, the President of NBC News or his designee."

The Shays donation is one of multiple Kudlow has made since joining CNBC.

Update: Both of the hosts of CNBC's "The Strategy Session" also made political donations this cycle. Gary Kaminsky gave $1,000 to Mitt Romney's Free & Strong America PAC and David Faber gave $1,500 to Republican candidate Nan Hayworth, who beat Rep. John Hall in New York's 19th.

I think we can break down the legislative situation for the GOP into a few parts:

1. Symbolic stuff. The Party of No strategy means trying to create as many tough votes for the Democrats as possible, while simultaneously giving conservatives members of Congress as many good votes as possible to trumpet to skeptical activists back home. Good: Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment (and, really, any constitutional amendments they can think of). Good: ostentatiously reading each bill. Good: fulfilling their (entirely symbolic and meaningless) pledge to insert a clause in bills saying why they're constitutional. Also good: investigations into malfeasance, real or imagined, in the Obama administration and among liberals generally.

2. Substantive stuff they really want to enact. I'm not talking about repealing healthcare, which they know they can't do and which they may or may not care about anyway; I'm talking about mostly bite-sized, doable, payoffs to interest groups items that GOP constituencies care about. More money for missile defense, less for NPR -- that sort of thing. For these, Boehner should be very willing to compromise with Democrats in the Senate and the White House to get half a loaf rather than nothing.

3. Stuff they have to do whether they like it or not. Chief among these are annual appropriations bills, and increases in the national debt ceiling.

4. Unexpected stuff. Just worth mentioning that we can't really see everything that they'll have to handle.

Now, where are the weaknesses for Boehner?

First, many Tea Party and other GOP activists want confrontation for its own sake. That may make the substantive stuff difficult, and may create huge problems for #3 above. Some members of the Republican conference are going to find it very difficult to pass must-pass items, either because they honestly believe that lots of the normal things the federal government has done for decades are unconstitutional, or because they're terrified of primaries from half-crazed constituents who believe those things are unconstitutional.

Even worse, I do think that a fair number of activists want to refight the 1995-1996 shutdowns. As Boehner no doubt knows, everything about the politics of such a confrontation works badly for the House Republicans. Nevertheless, the leadership is vulnerable to charges of sellout on this, and they'll have to be disciplined enough to realize that actual shutdown doesn't end that problem.

Second, many Tea Party and other GOP activists passionately support contradictory and unpopular budget goals: balanced budgets with much smaller revenues and unpopular spending cuts. I'm reasonably confident that a unified front of GOP elites could satisfy these activists with symbolic stuff such as bans on earmarks and long-term goals "reached" with creative math, but as I said earlier there are clearly strong incentives for talk show hosts, backbench members of Congress, and presidential candidates to stake out positions to the right of the GOP leadership in Congress, and they may well call Boehner on it.

Third, healthcare. Just as there were no good options for Democrats in marginal districts when healthcare was being passed, there are no good options for Republicans in marginal districts now. A just-plain repeal vote -- full stop -- leaves them vulnerable to being attacked over the many very popular things in the bill, some of which are already implemented and would actually be noticed if they were repealed. Partial repeal leaves them vulnerable to charges of betrayal from activists. It's also actually difficult to find unpopular but significant slices of ACA to repeal. As for defunding, I think the Washington Post story gets this right: it doesn't really do what the GOP wants it to do.

I see two paths on healthcare that would at least plausibly work for the Republicans. One is to do a repeal-and-replace vote in the House that involves passing an entirely nonworkable bill designed to include all the goodies in ACA, at least on the surface. It doesn't matter if there are no works inside; after all, the bill wouldn't stand a chance in the Senate, so it only needs to be designed to deal with attack ads, not the real world. The other, and better, path, is to just do a bill to eliminate the individual mandate. Of course, policy analysts will point out that without the individual mandate the ACA won't work -- but good government truth squadders would probably not give their seal of approval to attack ads saying that it's a vote against coverage for preexisting conditions.

Again, all of this analysis assumes that House Republicans choose to be the Party of No for the next two years. It seems to me that on that path the prospects for John Boehner depend on the extent to which GOP unity inside and outside the House can triumph over the impulse of everyone to prove themselves the "true" conservatives. Once that starts, Boehner has no good options; he's either going to wind up a RINO victim of a purge, or he's going to keep the approval of the fringe and make his conference massively unpopular with everyone outside the fringe.

But if they can stay as united in defense of phony symbolic actions by the Republican House as they were in opposition to phony threats of czars, death panels, gun control, and Black Panthers, then they'll all survive the next two years in pretty good shape.

* The necessary caveat: I'm still not at all convinced that Republican rejectionism in 2009-2010 has much to do with Republican success in the 2010 cycle, and may have done little more in most cases than to cost them in terms of policy outcomes.

The National Journal writes that Joe Miller won't concede until all the absentee votes have been counted, because he thinks he has an edge with military voters. Between military votes and those tossed for misspelling "Murkowski," Miller could still pull this out. And the military vote is huge in Alaska, because of Alaska's socialist Permanent Fund Dividend.

Service-members stationed in Alaska get their annual oil-checks like anyone else. And so do service-members not really stationed in Alaska -- as long as they meet a couple conditions, laid out by a James Fallows reader:

Turns out that they and their family members can get the big dividend fund checks anyway! But that's not the kicker. The kicker is that they and their family members remain eligible to continue receiving such checks long after they have left Alaska, so long as they remain on active duty, return to Alaska for 72 hours per year (unless duty prevents this, such as being stationed elsewhere -- duh!), AND DO NOT REGISTER TO VOTE IN ANY OTHER STATE THAN ALASKA.

No matter what, it seems obvious that a plurality of Alaskans voted to send Lisa Murkowski back to the Senate. But, you know, that's not always how American elections are decided.

"I became aware of Keith's political contributions late last night. Mindful of NBC News policy and standards, I have suspended him indefinitely without pay."

There are a few things going on here: one is that Olbermann did violate NBC's rules against contributing to political campaigns (though many others getting an MSNBC paycheck  apparently have as well -- more on this below). Another is that there's a history of tension between Griffin and Olbermann, who told the New Yorker in 2008, "Phil thinks he’s my boss." So it's possible MSNBC was looking for an excuse to fire Olbermann. And, finally, MSNBC may be making a play to show it has more integrity than Fox, whose parent company, News Corporation, gave $1 million each to the Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Governors Association.

Griffin had seized on Fox's donations earlier this year, telling the Times, "Show me an example of us fund-raising." So presented with evidence of Olbermann's donations to Democratic candidates -- even if they are qualitatively and quantitatively different from Fox's corporate donations -- Griffin found himself in an awkward spot.

Meanwhile, MSNBC's replacement for Olbermann tonight, Chris Hayes of The Nation, has also acknowledged giving at least $250 to a friend of his who was running for Congress in Alabama. (To be clear: there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. He is an opinion journalist, and he was not covering his friend.) It appears that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough also gave several thousand dollars to a Republican congressional candidate in 2006. And MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan has also given to Republicans. Again, these are opinionated commentators who regularly offer their political views.

Interestingly, Olbermann is not the only prominent TV host to contribute to a politician this cycle. Sean Hannity of Fox gave $5,000 to Rep. Michele Bachmann's PAC over the summer, as Salon reported at the time. In response to that reveleation, Fox told a Minnesota newspaper:

Fox News programming head Bill Shine said there's no company policy against talk show personalities giving to candidates, but said Hannity would disclose the donation when Bachmann appears.

"It always good to remember that he's not a journalist, he's a conservative TV host," Shine said. "If he wants to donate to a candidate, he certainly can."

Now, as it turns out, Hannity had Bachmann on after the donation and did not disclose it. Fox's policy, if they followed it, actually makes a lot of sense here. Hannity's entire show is about promoting conservatives candidates and ideas. Olbermann's show is about promoting progressives. Olbermann, however, did not disclose his $2,400 donation to Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) on the same day he interviewed him. That seems more problematic than the donation itself.

UPDATE: MSNBC is now saying that Hayes will not replace Olbermann tonight, though it's not clear why.

UPDATE II: If Olbermann violated NBC rules, than CNBC host Larry Kudlow likely did as well. 

If she succeeds, and it's likely that she will, Pelosi will become the first speaker since Republican Joe Martin in 1954 to move from speaker to minority leader after an election. In the run-up to this week's midterm, in which Democrats lost at least 61 seats, it was widely assumed that the 70-year-old Pelosi would step down as party leader and retire from Congress if Democrats lost their majority -- the same course that her immediate predecessor, Republican Dennis Hastert, followed back in 2006.

So why is she staying? The obvious answer is that she's not ready to get out of politics. So if she wants to stay in the House, why not play a meaningful role? As I wrote on Thursday:

Given the right's venomous demonization of her, you can imagine the satisfaction that Pelosi would take from leading her party into the 2012 election and somehow winning back the majority. But it's not likely that she, or any Democratic leader, will be able to engineer such a quick turnaround, given that so many of the seats that the GOP won back this week were in districts that voted for John McCain in 2008 or where Barack Obama's margin over McCain was narrow -- the kinds of districts that Democrats can't really win unless Republicans are in control of Washington and voters are upset (like in 2006 and 2008). Democrats can certainly make gains in 2012 -- as they did in 1996, two years after the Gingrich "revolution" -- but enough to take back the House? It's hard to see. Still, the idea of achieving such vindication two years from now, however unlikely, could be part of her current calculations.

The question now is who will challenge Pelosi for the minority leader's slot. The most obvious candidate is Steny Hoyer, the current majority leader and Pelosi's longtime rival. They vied for three years in an on-again/off-again leadership battle that resulted in a 118-95 Pelosi victory in October 2001 -- but the fight hardly ended there. When Democrats took back the majority in 2006, Pelosi's first act was to try to flush Hoyer out of the leadership, aggressively backing John Murtha's effort to supplant Hoyer as the Democrats' No. 2 leader. Hoyer won handily -- thanks in part to support from many of the centrist members elected in the '06 wave.

Hoyer publicly said this week that he would pursue the minority leader's slot if Pelosi stepped aside. But will he challenge her for it? He'd find support from moderate and conservative members, his natural constituency within the Democratic caucus, but it was moderates and conservative members who lost disproportionately on Tuesday. Hoyer's base had eroded. He'd need to make up for it by attracting more traditionally liberal members who simply want a new public face for their party after Tuesday's drubbing.

It's also worth wondering whether Pelosi has actually been strengthened by Tuesday's verdict. With so many Blue Dogs losing, liberals make up a much bigger share of the Democratic caucus than before. Could she now have the numbers to flush Hoyer from the leadership altogether? The No. 3 House Democrat, South Carolina's James Clyburn, has said he has no plans to challenge Hoyer -- but Clyburn was clearly (like everyone else) expecting Pelosi to leave and for Hoyer to succeed her; he was positioning himself to move up to Hoyer's No. 2 slot. Might Pelosi now convince him to take a run at Hoyer? Or maybe John Larson, another Pelosi ally and the No. 4 House Democrat, will make a bid. Or someone else.

There's also a chance that stability will prevail -- that Hoyer will refuse to challenge Pelosi and that, in return, she'll resist taking him on. Under that scenario, Pelosi would face a token challenge from one of the remaining Blue Dogs -- Heath Shuler of North Carolina, perhaps -- for the minority leader's job. But the purpose of such a challenge would be symbolic -- to allow Blue Dogs to tell their constituents they didn't vote for Pelosi. It would be akin to the futile challenges that conservative Democratic Reps. Charlie Rose and Charlie Stenholm launched against Richard Gephardt and David Bonior after the Democrats' 1994 House drubbing.

Update: Per Hotline's Reid Wilson, Hoyer's office is saying that he will "spend the next couple of days talking to members" about running for minority whip, which will be the Democrats' No. 2 post in the next Congress. That could put him on a collision course with Clyburn, who is the current majority whip. And if Clyburn were to seek the next post down the totem poll, he might then be on a collision course with Larson, who is now the Democratic caucus chairman. Below Larson is Xavier Becerra of California, who is now the vice chairman of the caucus. The issue here is that there are five leadership slots on the majority side, and four on the minority side. So if Pelosi stays around as leader, one of the four Democrats immediately below her will have to leave the leadership.

"In fact, there is no comparison," Shirley writes in a FoxNews.com column, "mainly because even though Reagan's popularity had sagged and support for Reaganomics had fallen, when pressed, in all the polling data, the American people still believed in Reagan's prescriptions. "

I've written plenty about the absurdity of wishful, backward-looking assertions like this, so I'll leave that aspect of Shirley's piece alone. But something else he wrote caught my eye:

[Reagan] did all these things because he believed and lived American Exceptionalism.

And then he rode off into the sunset, never worrying about his post-presidency as a means of cleaning up the mess of his time in office.

He left no mess but instead, the country and the world much better off than he found it. Reagan's legacy didn't need to be rehabilitated. After all, his approval rating in January of 1989 was 70 percent. Among voters under 30, it was a mind boggling 85 percent!

This, of course, is the right's preferred Reagan narrative, the idea that his presidency was one long love fest between leader and the people, and that even after he left office Americans never stopped yearning for a Reagan restoration. But it is absolutely false.

I'll take Shirley's word on Reagan's January '89 poll numbers, although I seem to recall Reagan's poll numbers spiking in his final weeks in office, when the news was filled with retrospectives on his presidency and tributes from his allies and foes -- coverage that would boost any president's ratings. But what Shirley ignores, like all Reagan hagiographers, is the remarkable, precipitous decline in the Gipper's public image over the next five years, as Americans grappled with some of the consequences of his presidency.

Shirley pretends there was no "mess" left to clean up, but tell that to George H.W. Bush, who upon taking office had to deal with a Savings and Loan crisis brought on by Reagan's policies. Bush ultimately authorized a massive, politically toxic bailout -- and the crisis has much to do with the recession of 1990 and 1991. There was also the little matter of Iran-Contra, the scheme by which arms were sold to Iran with the profits used to fund an illegal war in Central America, which resulted in the indictment of 14 Reagan administration members, 11 of whom were ultimately convicted (although some of the convictions were later tossed out). Reagan himself was still dealing with that mess after leaving the presidency; here's some of his testimony from 1990:

And then, of course, there was the national debt, which in the 192 years before Reagan's presidency had risen to around $1 trillion. But in just eight years under Reagan, it exploded to nearly $3 trillion, thanks to his steep tax cuts, ramped-up defense spending and failure to reduce the size of government. Again, it was left to Bush to try to clean up the mess; hence, Bush's 1990 decision to raise taxes in an effort to tame the country's deficits. Like the S&L bailout, this was a deeply unpopular move, especially in light of Bush's "no new taxes" pledge in 1988, but was -- ultimately -- one of the reasons America was running surpluses by the end of the 1990s.

The mess brought Reagan's poll numbers crashing down to earth in his post-presidency. By the summer of 1992, a USA Today/Gallup poll found that just 24 percent of Americans said their country was better off because of the Reagan years, with 40 percent saying it was worse off. Reagan's own favorable rating had fallen to 46 percent -- making him significantly less popular than Jimmy Carter, whose favorable score was at 63 percent at the time. Republicans brought Reagan out for their 1992 convention in Houston (with polls showing Bush losing badly to Bill Clinton), but the magic  was gone. Here's how Adam Nagourney, then with USA Today, explained it in a news story at the time:

With his personable style and shrewd grasp of changing political attitudes, Ronald Reagan once loomed as a larger-than-life figure - a threat fearsome to Democrats even in retirement.

But when the former president speaks tonight at the Republican convention, he does it with the Democrats' blessing. Because the man for whom an entire political movement was named - Reagan Democrats, the blue-collar voters who fled their party's presidential candidates in the 1980s - has come to personify Bill Clinton's main assault on President Bush.

Not only has Reagan's popularity dropped steadily since he left office, but more ominous for Bush's re-election, Reagan's standing has fallen among Reagan Democrats as Clinton has repeatedly hammered his economic policies as favoring the rich. 

The political picture has changed so much that Clinton's sole scheduled appearance this week is with Jimmy Carter, the man Reagan defeated in 1980.

Of course, Reagan's image has since been restored, something that has a lot to do with time and distance; the details of his presidency are largely forgotten now, which makes the effect of video clips from his days as president much more powerful. Plus, as Will Bunch has written, the right has since the mid-1990s engaged in a concerted effort to restore Reagan's standing. He was always a compelling public performer, and if anything, his old speeches are more effective when viewed today. The conservatives who lionize Reagan today are worshiping a flattering caricature. The real Reagan, as president and in the immediate aftermath of his presidency, had a far more complicated relationship with public opinion.

This presents a slight problem for House leadership. They like the more "serious" Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) for the position. But the activist base loves Bachmann. And unlike Democrats, the GOP doesn't take any perverse pleasure in punishing its base. (And their base doesn't suck it up and take it when they're denied what they want.)

Serious Policy Wonk Paul Ryan is telling GOP members to support Hensarling:

“Jeb's economic expertise and strong ability to communicate are what we need in our conference chairman to articulate our unified commitment to get our country back on track,” Ryan wrote in the letter. “This position requires someone who has a command of these issues and has a history of successfully debating them.”

But Bachmann has her own letter!

Bachmann, according to the letter obtained by POLITICO, is making the case that she brings “strong principled conservative values, a proven level of experience, effectiveness with our friends in the local and national media, and an energetic national constituency that reflects the results of Tuesday night.”

“It is important that our conference demonstrate to the people who sent us here that their concerns will be tirelessly advanced at the table of leadership,” she wrote.

Presumptive Speaker John Boehner hasn't endorsed anyone, but the rest of the leadership is lining up behind Hensarling.

Red State's Erick Erickson, a man who will soon be spending a lot of time selling the GOP's internet base on decisions made by the sell-out leadership, is currently endorsing a compromise:

I think having Jeb Hensarling as Conference Chair and Michelle Bachmann as Vice Chair would be a powerful duo. Hensarling is a very substantive policy guy. Michelle Bachmann gave up campaigning for herself to go all over the country for Republicans this year. She deserves a seat at the table.

I'd be shocked if the eventual resolution of this little fight doesn't look more or less like that.

Bachmann, meanwhile, is in the middle of one of her horrible "thing she heard on the internet" media tours, where she repeats dubious claims made by Free Republic commenters (it's all part of the process whereby idiotic untruths bubble up from the imaginations of fevered conspiracy theorists to prominent media figures on talk radio and Fox). This time it's the story of how Barack Obama's trip to India will cost "$200 million per day," which is not true.

The piece also notes that MSNBC president Phil Griffin tweaked Fox recently for the $2 million in corporate donations that it gave Republican Party groups.

It seems like there are two issues here: one is whether an opinionated host like Olbermann should be allowed by his employer to give to political candidates. And the other is whether, if he does contribute, he should disclose that fact when he interviews said candidates. The first question is debatable; the second seems like an issue of basic ethics.

It's also worth noting that Fox's Sean Hannity, who is a rough analogue of Olbermann on the right (except more powerful and popular), gave $5,000 to Michele Bachmann's political action committee in August, as Salon reported at the time. We asked a Fox spokeswoman about this at the time, but she declined to give a statement.

That Hannity contribution came on Aug. 31. Two weeks later, on Sept. 17, he interviewed Bachmann on his Fox show and did not disclose the donation.

This may seem like a curious statement, in light of the midterm "shellacking" Obama's party just endured: The 61 (or more) House seats that Republicans picked up marks the biggest single election gain for any party since 1950, reflecting broad dissatisfaction with the president. Obama's approval ratings are, and have been for more than a year, in shaky territory; if they don't budge -- or if they get worse -- between now and '12, just about every election prediction model available would forecast a defeat.

But Tuesday also demonstrated that, even in a political climate poisoned against the Democratic Party, voters have their limits. When joblessness is stuck near 10 percent, they'll vote for almost anyone who's not a member of the president's party. Almost anyone -- but not anyone.

That's the lesson from Nevada, where Harry Reid was just reelected -- by 5 points and with an outright majority -- under conditions that no incumbent has any business surviving. Nevada is a swing state, unemployment is higher there than anywhere else in the nation, home foreclosures are rampant, and Reid's popularity -- thanks to his long tenure in Washington and his status as the party's Senate leader -- has dipped to career-killing depths. But for an opponent he drew Sharron Angle, a candidate so alarmingly erratic and ideologically extreme that voters held their noses and sent the reviled Reid back to Washington for six more years. The bar for Angle was absurdly, comically low -- and she still couldn't clear it.

Two things are striking about Angle's failure: 1) You could see it coming; even before the GOP primary, it was obvious that Angle's nomination would give Reid -- supposedly the Republican Party's top target for 2010 -- his best and only chance of winning; and 2) The Republican Party's base -- also known as the Tea Party -- insisted on nominating her anyway. In other words, this was not a case of Republicans nominating a normal, seemingly electable candidate only to catch a bad break with that candidate committing some terrible gaffe (or being undermined by some devastating revelation) in the general election. This was a train wreck that the Republican Party base knowingly and willingly brought upon itself, all in the name of ideological purity.

Nor is Nevada the only place where the Tea Party base did this. Establishment Republicans pleaded with their base to nominate Mike Castle in Delaware, in the name of winning the seat in November. But the base, egged on by Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing voices, went ahead and anointed Christine O'Donnell, in the name of purity. A 15-point win in November turned into a 15-point loss. Something similar happened in Alaska, where Tea Partier Joe Miller appears headed for defeat (after a lengthy court fight, it would seem). There, at least, Miller's candidacy didn't cost the GOP a seat, with Lisa Murkowski poised to win on write-ins; but it could have -- and it would have been fine with the base.

This is the mind-set that has gripped the Republican Party in the age of Obama. Not since the late 1970s have we seen this kind of purge campaign within the GOP, and the ramifications for 2012 are potentially huge.

That the GOP nominates the "next in line" guy every time it has an open presidential nomination is conventional wisdom. But that tradition is in peril heading into 2012. Will the GOP that gave us Angle, O'Donnell, Miller and Ken Buck really choose Mitt Romney (who would probably have little trouble defeating Obama if the economy is weak) when they could have, say, Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich? Notably, Tuesday's exit polls found that Romney now leads Obama in a hypothetical match-up, by 5 points. But Gingrich trails by 2, and Palin by 8. It's early, yes, but this was the same kind of warning  sign that Republicans in Delaware were getting when they chose O'Donnell.

It's true that plenty of Tea Party-backed candidates won on Tuesday, and for this there are several explanations. On the House side, a major component of the Republican gains came in districts that were won by John McCain in 2008 (even as they sent Democrats to the House); in these districts, Tea Party ideology simply wasn't much of a liability. Plus, House candidates tend to be more anonymous to voters than Senate candidates, so it was easier for Tea Party candidates to slip through simply on the strength of their Republican label -- a clear asset in most parts of the country this year. And the Tea Partiers who won Senate races benefited from political demography (like Rand Paul in Kentucky, a state whose voters were hostile to Barack Obama even before he was elected) or reassuring personalities. Marco Rubio will probably vote exactly the same way Christine O'Donnell would have in the Senate, but he is a skilled public performer who communicates competence and authority. In the atmosphere of 2010, with voters badly wanting to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt, this was enough for Rubio, who was also helped by  the three-way nature of Florida's Senate race. (In this sense, Rubio's victory can be likened to Ronald Reagan's in 1980; then, the economy was in terrible shape and voters were hungry to push Jimmy Carter out, but polls showed deep concerns about Reagan's ideological extremism; ultimately, Reagan's personality was reassuring enough to clear the low bar that voters had set.)

What separated O'Donnell, Angle and Miller from victorious Tea Partiers is that they were, as statewide candidates, in the media's spotlight -- and their performance in that spotlight thoroughly undermined the public's confidence in them. But through it all, they remained favorites of their party base. This is, essentially, the story of Sarah Palin's national political career. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not believe she is qualified for the presidency -- but the GOP base does. Gingrich, for different reasons, similarly turns off general election voters.

Whether the GOP will nominate Palin or Gingrich, or some equally toxic candidate, is an open question. Besides Romney, there are potential Republican candidates who, like Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania this week, would fall into the "flawed but good enough to win if the circumstances are just right" category. Haley Barbour comes to mind here; if the GOP nominates him and the economy is staggering, he could probably beat Obama. But voters showed this week that they do have their limits, and a nominee like Palin or Gingrich would clearly test those limits in '12. Nor is it hard to envision the same purity-over-electability fervor that prevailed this year guiding Republican primary voters in two years.

If the economy turns around, I'll stand by my belief that Barack Obama will be reelected no matter whom the Republicans nominate. But even if it doesn't, I still think he might get by. Among Republicans, non-electability seems to be in vogue.