At the head of the line: Sarah Palin

The WaPo's Chris Cillizza makes us positively dizzy the way he bounces Sarah Palin around his sorta weekly Top Ten list of ranking Republican leaders known as Friday Line. One week she may be at #9 on the list, after having been listed at #2 the previous time. 

Though this feature of Cillizza's The Fix blog is just one guy's opinion, and the relative rankings appear to be somewhat arbitrarily determined, it's fun to follow. We simple folk here in Flyover County, Texas have some degree of difficulty understanding the way The Beltway Bunch think, so different is the internal wiring of heads on the Campus of Big Government Central. So we like to examine every little clue we get from there as if we were scientists with Double Top Secret Probation clearances trying to reverse-engineer some captured alien spacecraft in an attempt to figure out where they are coming from and how they got here.

This week, at least, Cillizza has Sarah on top of the heap:

1. Sarah Palin: Like it or not, the former Alaska governor is the prime mover in Republican politics at the moment. Her memoir -- "Going Rogue" -- immediately went to number one on Amazon's bestsellers list despite the fact that it won't be released until the middle of next month. And Republican operatives all acknowledge that if you want to ensure a big and energetic crowd at a GOP event the best way to make that happen is to get Palin there. Of course, Palin's political operation is nonexistent and she seems entirely uninterested/unable to capitalize politically from the amount of interest she generates. (Previous ranking: 9)

Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Haley Barbour occupy the next four slots, in that order. Though the entire list is safely tucked away in a nondescript hanger somewhere at Area 51, you can access it here.

- JP