The Daily Beast

For the Republican Party, Sarah Palin has been a problem with no solution. She is a divisive figure, a culture warrior whose celebrity and command of media attention has allowed her to eclipse or bully party leaders with more appeal to independents. No one within the party has been able to put her in her place.

Until late last week, when Palin got into a media fight with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Is the love affair between California’s Republican governor and the Democratic president over?

Californians, meet your next governor.

Let’s call him Jerry Schwarzenegger.

As former California Gov. Jerry Brown officially rolled out his 2010 campaign for governor this week, he was confronted by questions about how a new Brown term in the stateh ouse might be different than his first, an entertaining if unfocused eight-year stretch from 1975 to 1983.

Harold Ford is exiting the New York Senate race the same way he almost entered it: incoherently. Start with his supposed reason for not running. “If I run,” he wrote in The New York Times, “the likely result would be a brutal and highly negative Democratic primary—a primary where the winner emerges weakened and the Republican strengthened. I refuse to do anything that would help Republicans win a Senate seat in New York, and give the Senate majority to the Republicans.”

Democrats are considering using the reconciliation process to pass health-care reform in the Senate, a maneuver that would require only 51 votes. Republicans are outraged. Using reconciliation to pass health care, they insist, would be undemocratic.

What does eBay CEO-turned-California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman have in common with Muhammad Ali?

A strategy called rope-a-dope.

Rope-a-dope takes its name from a 1974 fight in Zaire, when the champ spent the first several rounds taking a beating so that his bigger opponent, George Foreman, would exhaust himself from all the punches. Having survived this early assault, Ali knocked out an exhausted Foreman later in the fight.

If you missed the big Conservative Political Action Committee powwow over the weekend in Washington, you missed some pretty dumb speeches. In denouncing President Obama’s health-care reform effort, Mitt Romney declared that “Americans will not endure government-run health care, a new and expensive entitlement, an inexplicable and surely vanishing cut in Medicare, and an even greater burden of taxes.” Then he went on to praise President Bush.

To understand why Senator Evan Bayh’s surprise retirement is such a big deal, it’s important to realize that Indiana has always held a special place in the Democratic Party’s heart. It was the state, more than any other, which created the legend of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential bid. In the late 1960s, the state had a reputation for racism, a reputation built from decades of Klan power, and from its heavy support in 1964 for the presidential bid of arch-segregationist George Wallace.

As Arizona Senator John McCain runs for his fifth term, he should be untouchable. Instead, he's facing a primary challenge from J.D. Hayworth, a former Republican congressman who lost his deep-red seat in the Phoenix suburbs in the Democratic tidal wave of 2006. All recent polls show McCain beating J.D. Hayworth—a man the Arizona Republic memorably accused of "bombastic rhetoric and obnoxious behavior"—by a wide margin, from 59 percent to 30 percent in a poll sponsored by McCain to 49 percent to 33 percent in a poll sponsored by Hayworth.