Sarah Palin Is Brilliant

Joe Klein and David Broder remain wowed by Sarah Palin's Tea Party performance and weigh in with dovetailing columns today that place her at the head of the GOP class for 2012. In Time, Klein blasts the speech itself as "inspired drivel" full of gross simplifications. "But I will not deride. Because brilliance must be respected, especially when it involves marketing in an era when image almost always passes for substance."

Palin, he writes, strikes the same "mystic chords" as Bill Clinton, who came off as a man of the people. At the Washington Post, Broder praises her "pitch-perfect recital of the populist message that has worked in campaigns past." She's exactly what America's looking for right now in its "current mood." And "those who want to stop her will need more ammunition than deriding her habit of writing on her hand. The lady is good." (More Sarah Palin stories.)