OPPOSITION REQUIRES SUBSTANCE. Victor Davis Hanson interprets Sarah Palin's continued visibility as a reaction to what is.

Yet Palin won’t quite go away, given her opposition to the two most unpopular institutions in America today: Big Government and High Finance.

The voters are tiring on left-wing, condescending big government. An Eric Holder, Timothy Geithner and Barack Obama are the best reflections of the contradictory urge to redistribute money, and hector the productive upper-middle classes—while at the same time indulging their rarefied tastes and desire for privilege through government administration.

Yet Wall Street elites are no more popular. They are seen as selfish, conniving, and of no political persuasion other than kowtowing to the particular powers that be in Washington. Their creed is not conservatism or liberalism, but rather statism and the marriage of the federal government and high finance. And we now know these one-eyed jacks. Federal regulators (cf. e.g., Timothy Geithner, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Hank Paulson, Franklin Raines, etc) drift in and out of Wall Street. In exchange for guaranteeing that firms don’t fail and get sweetheart attention, federal officials are promised that during their sabbaticals from Washington they are to be accorded ceremonial jobs with access to near automatic multimillion-dollar bonuses.

Rick Moran notes, however, that merely being Not The Failed Establishment is not sufficient.

But even Hanson recognizes where she is right now. It has been a year since she burst onto the national scene and she has done little to rectify the huge gaps in knowledge and nuance that exposed her as an intellectually unserious person during the campaign. And by that I mean simply that she has failed to apply herself in any meaningful way to the process of learning what she needs to know in order to become a successful politician. Not an academic. Not a pointy-headed elite at some think tank, but rather a thoughtful citizen of the republic who knows enough about the issues facing America to serve effectively.

It will take good ideas to lift the burden of the current government's bad ideas.