"The guy sitting in the White House," says Tancredo, is a greater threat to the Constitution than al-Qaeda. Serious, mainstream Republican Senate candidates could have won in Delaware and Nevada. Even following a historically good Republican election, the Golden State will be served by Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer, giving California Republicans good reason to despair. During this midterm cycle, Republicans became reacquainted with estranged friends: independents, seniors, college-educated voters, working-class voters, rural voters and suburban voters. The implicit message of two generations of negative ads: Vote conservative, limit the reach of the thieves. Sharron Angle was taped in a private meeting with a potential supporter, who leaked it to the press, to her embarrassment. He honestly didn't understand what the country was doing. Palin recently took to Fox Business Network to call establishment Republicans "sleazy."
– Sarah Palin thinks the GOP establishment is out to get her, and it sure feels like the knives are out. There's Rove, of course, and then Bush (or at least a source claiming to speak for him), and now two former presidential speechwriters, Michael Gerson and Peggy Noonan, the latter of whom busts out the word "nincompoop" to describe her: Gerson: She's "increasingly tolerant of disturbing extremism" and doesn't seem to care about the consequences for the GOP. Her endorsement of Tom Tancredo "raises the question of whether Palin has any standards for her support other than anti-government rhetoric," he writes in the Washington Post. "Either as a power broker or a candidate in the 2012 election, Palin's increasingly erratic political judgment should raise Republican concerns." Noonan: In a Wall Street Journal column devoted mostly to bashing Obama—he's a "human depression" that Democrats would be wise to abandon, she argues—Noonan rips Palin for dissing Reagan (for whom she wrote speeches) as an "actor." She rises to his defense: "The point is not 'He was a great man and you are a nincompoop,' though that is true." Reagan "brought his fully mature, fully seasoned self into politics with him," she writes. He had accomplished great things before becoming president. His "career is a guide, not only for the tea party but for all in politics."