First Read today mentioned the fight between Palinism and McDonellism. This will be a journalistic trope for a while, so it’s worth noting what a false choice it should be. First, if we accept the terms for the sake of argument, Palin was a McDonnellite before McDonnell, since her success in Alaska was based on addressing practical issues of governance with a common-sense conservatism that appealed to the right and the center. Second, you really can’t have one without the other. You need both an energized grass roots attached to an indisputably conservative candidate (which I’m guessing is a key part of what First Read would define as Palinism), together with a compelling policy agenda that appeals beyond the conservative base (so-called McDonnellism). McDonnell had the first (he was an unabashed social conservative, indeed I hazard to guess is as conservative as Palin) and added the second in the way winning conservatives have across the decades, from Newt Gingrich to Ronald Reagan. As I wrote earlier this week, I really don’t think there’s a Palinism per se. And if Palin is going to run for president and succeed as a candidate, she’d need to return to her McDonnellism, advancing a specific agenda and winning over the center as well as the right. The always-impressive Patrick Ruffini was particularly good on this basic question in the immediate wake of McDonnell’s victory:

Republicans in Virginia have struggled to make their prescriptions relevant to swing voters. Our issues in local elections have traditionally been issues like taxes and immigration that don’t always lend themselves to policy heft. And a lack of policy heft has translated into an intangible sense that there’s not enough “there there.”
This was the central challenge facing the McDonnell campaign at its outset, and so it systematically sought to dismantle this critique by branding McDonnell as a practical problem solver without compromising his conservative principles.
Republicans can be specific, detailed, and confident in putting forward solutions relevant to the middle class, while also being more conservative than we have been in recent years (especially with the Bush era spending binge). There’s not an either/or tradeoff between conservatism and a policy focus, something the McDonnell campaign proved in Virginia this year.
The lesson of the McDonnell campaign: Maintain your conservative principles, but make the election about policy. And whatever the issue, make sure you’ve got an app for that.