A THOUSAND POUND GORILLA TAKES ON THE ESTABLISHMENT

She’s mighty cute for a thousand pound gorilla.

Last Friday (9/18) Sarah Palin drew 1,400 people — the largest crowd ever — for the annual Reagan dinner in Des Moines, Iowa.  Her appearance in the state that holds the first presidential nominating contest followed by three days the stunning upset victory of Christine O’Donnell, the woman she’d endorsed in Delaware’s Republican senate primary. Ms. O’Donnell said it was Ms. Palin’s endorsement that made her victory possible.

Of the 36 candidates in contested primaries who Ms. Palin endorsed, 25 won.  That’s a winning percentage of 69 percent, rather better than that of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.  Eight senate candidates backed by the Washington establishment lost.

Ms. Palin’s endorsement batting average is all the more remarkable because only a handful of the candidates she backed were slam dunks, such as former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who is heavily favored to get his old job back.

Two of her picks for the senate besides Ms. O’Donnell — Joe Miller in Alaska and Sharron Angle in Nevada — won in stunning upsets, as did Nikki Haley in South Carolina’s GOP gubernatorial primary.

Ms. Palin’s decision to get involved “was a huge boon to our campaign, because it caused a lot of South Carolinians to take a second look at a once little known — but rising in the polls —  state legislator who was fighting to give them back their government,” Rob Godfrey, a spokesman for Ms. Haley, told Investors Business Daily.

Other once obscure candidates who didn’t make it — such as Karen Handel in Georgia’s gubernatorial primary and Cecile Bledsoe in an Arkansas congressional race — came close because of Ms. Palin’s endorsement.

“It helped tremendously,” Ms. Bledsoe said.

Journalists spun every defeat of a Palin-backed candidate as a sign her influence was waning.  Alexandra Gutierrez of Slate was premature.  On the eve of the Alaska primary, she wrote:

“On Tuesday, in her home state, Sarah Palin’s favorite will probably get trounced.  Joe Miller is widely expected to lose by a large margin to incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary — an embarrassing defeat for the former governor, who has endorsed Miller.”

Whoops.

That Ms. Palin doesn’t share the journalists’ obsession with her won-loss record is made evident by her endorsement of Brian Murphy in Maryland’s gubernatorial primary.  Mr. Murphy, 33, got just 24 percent of the vote against former Gov. Bob Ehrlich Sep. 14.  But Ms. Palin’s embrace brought national attention to an attractive young conservative.

“This helps put Brian Murphy on the field and in the game,” a GOP consultant told the Washington Post.  “It calls attention to a candidacy that otherwise doesn’t exist.”

Many of the candidates Ms. Palin backed were women, such as Ms. Haley, Mary Fallin in the Oklahoma governor’s race and Susana Martinez in the New Mexico governor’s race.  If these “Mama Grizzlies” prevail in November — all lead in polls — they could do much to ameliorate the gender gap that’s opened in this election cycle. (Polls indicate men strongly favor Republicans, while women more narrowly prefer Democrats.)

The Washington establishment she’s beaten in so many primaries has ambivalent feelings about Ms. Palin.  But former Virginia Democrat Party Chairman Paul Goldman says GOP honchos should be grateful to her, because she’s kept tea party activists within the Republican party.

The elder President Bush, you’ll recall, was defeated for re-election in 1992 chiefly because so many fiscal conservatives defected to the independent candidacy of Ross Perot.

“That the GOP establishment fails to appreciate the debt it owes her is reflective of the elitist outlook that is contributing to tea party activism nationwide,” Mr. Goldman wrote.

Mr. Goldman noted no defeated vice presidential candidate has ever been nominated for president four years later.  But there’s a first time for everything.  In a “memo to Coastal Elites” Monday (9/20), Time’s Mark Halperin warned: “Palin is very much alive, and despite what you think, extraordinarily strong.”

A Rasmussen poll Monday underscored Mr. Halperin’s point.  Fifty two percent of respondents said their views were closer to Ms. Palin’s than to President Obama’s.  Only 40 percent of respondents said their views were closer to the president’s.