There are few more enthusiastic partisans of Sarah Palin than Gary P. Jackson. Palin deserves better hacks.

Writing in response to my suggestion that the RNC dump Michael Steele and hire Sarah Palin, Mr. Jackson launches into an angry, knuckle-draggingly misinformed, conspiracy-minded tirade, the upshot of which is that my proposal must be a naked bid to keep Palin out of the presidential running in 2012 in order to make room for the country-club Republican establishment’s anointed candidate, in whose service I labor so passionately.

Note to Gary P. Jackson: Minimum requirements for being a Republican Establishment hack include being a member of the Republican party, which I am not. I am well to the right of the Republican mainstream, and well to the right of Sarah Palin. Getting Palin out of the way to clear the path for Mitt Romney is not super-high on my agenda. Suffice is to say that in 2008 I was a lot more excited about the bottom of the GOP ticket than the top.

Second, Mr. Jackson writes that I am a “clown” for suggesting that policy minutiae is not Palin’s forte. He suggests that I educate myself by checking out her Twitter feed. Egad: When I wrote about the minutiae of policy development, I did not mean thoughts expressed in 140 characters or less. Perhaps I have an unrealistically high bar to clear for “minutiae,” but I did not mean right-wing haiku.

Writing that policy detail is not Palin’s forte is not the same as writing that Palin is unintelligent, which seems to be what Mr. Jackson and a few other like-minded people took from that self-evidently true observation. Ronald Reagan was a big-picture guy; Newt Gingrich is a devil-in-the-details guy. The world needs both, and there is no reason to think less of one than of the other. (I do not think that Sarah Palin would object to my suggesting that she is more like Reagan than like Gingrich; just a hunch.) Maybe Sarah Palin has authored a detailed policy paper on what to do about the Af-Pak border situation or the derivatives proposals in Frank-Dodd. If she did, I missed it. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that she hasn’t. And that’s okay. She doesn’t need to. We have people for that. Which is why I didn’t suggest sending Palin to a think tank, but putting her in charge of the Republican party.

I didn’t suggest replacing Steele with Palin because I think poorly of Palin, but because I think highly of Palin. I do not think that she is going to run for president in 2012. In any case, there is no reason for her to fall victim to Giuliani Syndrome — the belief that the only job in politics worth having is the presidency. (Seriously, New York could have used a Governor Giuliani.) I am not at the moment very much interested in the question of whom the Republicans will run for president in 2012; first, because none of the usual suspects are all that interesting, second, because I expect that Barack Obama will be re-elected.

On the other hand, I am very much interested in the size and character of the Republican congressional majorities that are expected to emerge in the next couple of elections, and having Palin at the RNC to help recruit, fund, and motivate the candidates who will constitute those majorities probably would be an excellent thing.

Palin is often accused of being poorly informed and overly defensive. I do not think that is true of her, but it certainly seems to be true of her loyalists. Happily, there is no transitive property of buffoonery.

So: Dump Steele, hire Palin.