Assuming the worst (but, of course, hoping for the best) for today, as one must, one of the fascinating questions to come revolves around what’s next for Sarah Palin, both as a political figure in her own right, and for what her future role will say about the evolution of the GOP. We’ve already had a few skirmishes here on the direction the GOP might take (and there will be more elsewhere), but when I read this comment by David Brooks in an article running in this week’s New York magazine, I don’t feel very optimistic about the tone of what lies ahead:

Others maintain that the damage to her image has been so enormous that it is essentially irreparable. And still others contend that she is simply too dim to be a major figure in our national life. When I asked Times columnist David Brooks if he thought that Palin could be the Republican nominee in 2012, he said, “I don’t.” When I asked why, he answered with a chuckle, “I just don’t think the human capital is there, to put it politely.”

Politely? Meanwhile, on a not entirely unrelated topic, I saw this interesting piece by Christopher Caldwell in the London Spectator:

The Democrats are now the partisan home of the upper crust of the American meritocracy, of the credentialled classes, the classes that believe every endeavour is some variety of IQ test. USA Today did a review of fund-raising data and discovered that Obama dominates fundraising among the leaders of ‘finance, insurance, real estate, health, communications and law’. His campaign has run through hundreds of millions more than McCain’s, and will spend a quarter of a billion dollars on television alone before this election is over. Obama has far more than twice as many ads up in Colorado, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In Florida, he has run 18,909 ads to McCain’s 5,702. The Democratic party is the vehicle through which, after a populist interlude, the governing classes are proposing to take their country back. Obama is a restoration candidate but that doesn’t mean he has a plan.

Food for thought.