Todd Palin endorses Newt Gingrich

First, Bill Daley resigned. Bill Daley has been Barack Obama’s chief of staff during 2011, which ranks in terms of Enjoyable Jobs somewhere just below dentist. Dentists get to meet all sorts of fascinating people but never get the chance to listen to anything that they are saying. Daley had the reverse problem.


Being the chief of staff, at the best of times, is not an easy job. But last year was the year when, for the most part, Barack Obama’s approval rating compared unfavorably to plague germs, because people had the sense that plague germs would not come into their place of employment, force them to register for socialist health plans, and end Christmas.


I am not saying that Daley didn’t love his job, but generally when you say, “I’d rather go back to Chicago in January than do this a day longer,” you aren’t having a grand time.


(I hear from at least one person that actually Chicago is lovely this time of year, making that last joke just another tragic casualty of climate change.)


Ha ha. We’re here to say it matters more than you think. OK, maybe it’s not a huge deal, but it has some significance. Otherwise Gingrich, who is a pretty shrewd guy, would just have let the accolade drop unanswered.

The point to be made here is in fact relatively obvious: Gingrich hopes to equate Todd’s nod with Sarah. A Palin endorsement would be a big help for someone whose campaign could be ended by a poor showing in South Carolina. It would give Gingrich more tea party bona fides in his competition with Rick Santorum for the non-Mitt Romney primary slot.


Sarah Palin herself has been coy about an endorsement. Recently she even warned the GOP against alienating Ron Paul’s voters, lest the Texas libertarian bolt and mount a third-party bid. It’s possible she won’t endorse anyone, or is holding off until she sees whether social conservatives rally around a single candidate in their effort to deny Mr. Romney the nomination.


Endorsements matter, after all. As New York Times polling analyst Nate Silver points out, they are important measures of party and institutional support. They may not win votes per se, but they communicate a candidate’s relative strength to the media and political insiders.


And in Mr. Silver’s rough listing of how important endorsements are, the nod of former national candidates ranks as high as any. (No, we know she didn’t run this year – she was a VP candidate in 2008. Remember?)


According to Washington Post political blogger Chris Cillizza, the most important kind of an endorsement is a symbolic one, such as Ted Kennedy endorsing Barack Obama in 2008. Mr. Obama touted Mr. Kennedy’s backing as evidence that he was the candidate of the old guard, true Democrats. A Palin endorsement might have something of the same cachet on the GOP side.

Are we getting ahead of ourselves here? Todd may have been freelancing. Right now, he may be getting in trouble with his wife. But it’s hard to not see him as a stand-in for Sarah, providing Gingrich with a sort of semi-Palin endorsement that allows the former Alaska governor to still stand somewhat outside the current Republican contest.