Still, who could help McCain beat back a populist conservative challenger? Sarah Palin. I predict that Palin will come to Arizona next summer to campaign for McCain, will make an impassioned case for him, and will help him win. She will thereby repay McCain for his confidence in picking her last year, help keep McCain as a crucial voice in the Senate for a strong foreign policy, and get credit for being a different kind of populist conservative—a Reaganite, not a Buchananite, populist—than the immigration-obsessed, voter-alienating (he was ousted in 2006 in a Republican district) Hayworth. ~Bill Kristol

One of the amusing things about Palin supporters is that very few of them are prepared to accept that Palin and McCain represent the same part of the Republican Party. For the most part, the people who love Palin loathe McCain as all the things they oppose in the GOP. It as if they think her appearance on the national stage would have happened apart from him. It is as if they black out all of the occasions when she endorsed positions McCain held (as she had to do as his running mate) that they otherwise find unacceptable. If she is supposed to represent some great right-populist hope, he is the deal-brokering, bipartisan “moderate” Beltway denizen who assiduously cultivates the media, but the reality is that he chose her partly because she reminded him of his own combative, arrogant, egocentric style and his habit of breaking party ranks to aggrandize himself.

Were she to side openly with McCain in a primary against Hayworth, whose views match up a lot more closely with her supporters’ views, she would be seen as imitating McCain’s worst habits. She would be considered a worse sell-out than McCain. She would be doing exactly the opposite of what she did in NY-23. Her intervention may have failed to elect Hoffman, but rank-and-file conservatives generally loved her for it anyway. She would fritter all that away if she backed McCain. In exchange for the contempt and disaffection of the people who currently adore her, she would win the enduring affection of editors at The Weekly Standard. McCain seems to be satisfied with this, but I doubt it would be enough for Palin.

Perhaps Palin could come up with some tortured rationale that siding with the establishment-friendly incumbent would be the crazy “maverick” thing to do, much as she claimed that staying in office would be the easy way out and quitting would be the courageous, bold move, but she would destroy the foundation of rank-and-file conservatives’ love for her. Palin generated such excitement because she was perceived by conservatives to be very different from McCain. This was wrong in many ways, but this was the source of all those enthusiastic calls for Palin to head the ticket and it is the reason why most conservatives instinctively sided with her during the campaign and all the internal squabbles with McCain’s staff. If she intervenes on McCain’s behalf, especially if it seems likely that Hayworth would otherwise win the nomination, she will destroy the political persona she has been crafting for the last year and cut herself off from the base she has thus far managed to captivate.