Not incidentally, all of this is helping push the conservative base further to the fringe of American politics, and almost certainly damaging the Republican Party. But if you think that bothers the right-wing merchants, you’ve got it backward. If anything, they are incentivized to help the GOP lose: Democrats in power give them a foe to rally the ideologues against (and a growing pool of disaffected Americans if the economy, or anything else, goes badly). The ascension of Obama and the Democrats was a financial godsend that repowered the gravy train — it was the best thing to happen to them since the Clinton era, when conservative talk-radio listenership tripled, and much of this industry was born.

Whether Palin intends to seek the nation’s highest office in 2012 or not, she certainly won’t say for the next 18 months. If she isn’t planning to run, saying so would remove some of her cachet, media attention, and influence. And if she is running, she won’t say so — because federal-election laws would then prohibit her from involvement in any political-action committees.

Palin can hit almost every hot button on the conservative-movement spectrum. The gun-rights crowd knows her as a rifle-toting hunter. The “Drill, Baby, Drill” crowd sees her as an energy expert. The populists buy the McCain-campaign-created image of the maverick reformer. To military fetishists, she is the proud mother of private first class Track Palin, soldier in Iraq. The economic conservatives praised her denouncing of the federal stimulus (although as governor she ultimately accepted almost every penny) and her willingness to suggest that Obama might be a socialist. (Her one major apostasy, belief in global warming, is almost never mentioned outside Alaska.)