Our longtime contributor Adam Brickley has written an interesting piece over at the Daily Caller making the case for why the establishment GOP might eventually change their tune on Governor Palin. It’s possible she’s the only person standing in the way of a Cain nomination. (Some polls now show him in a dead heat with Romney.)

Good reading here …

Personally, I like Cain a lot. He’s my firm second choice in this race after Palin. However, to many in the establishment,  the idea of nominating a political neophyte with a radical economic plan seems  crazy.

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Assuming she enters the race later this month, Sarah Palin will be able to  position herself as a sensible compromise between a terrified establishment and  the Cain-crazed base.

Palin brings a serious record of bipartisan governance in Alaska and a focus  on unifying the party behind the goal of ousting Barack Obama. In all  likelihood, she would position herself on the right of the field, but without  the damn-the-torpedoes attitude embodied by people like Cain and Bachmann.

Palin’s bread and butter in her Alaska days was her image as a  good-governance reformer rather than a rigid ideologue. She pushed hard for  solid conservative policy, slashing earmark requests and line-item vetoing  massive amounts of pork spending, but she also governed with a smile and often  with the grudging help of Democrats — who saw her anti-corruption zeal as  preferable to the oil-soaked crony-capitalism that defined the Alaskan  establishment. This is the image that Palin would try to project in a national  campaign

[...]

If you think about it, that’s exactly the image that the establishment wing  of the GOP has been shooting for all along. It’s why  many of them pursued the likes of Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, and before them  Bobby Jindal (remember when he was all the rage?). Palin actually brings those  qualities to the table and would articulate them forcefully in a debate setting.  That’s not to say she wouldn’t run as an anti-Washington tea partier, which she would. However, her  pragmatist, good-governance pitch would put miles of space between her and  ideological crusaders like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, which brings us  back to the expletive-laden hypothetical I started with.

The party establishment may not like Sarah Palin very much, but it may well  prefer her to Herman Cain. At the end of the day, Palin’s actual record (and her  usual campaign pitch) casts her not as a rigid puritanical  witch … After the collapse of Perry and the rise of Cain, that message could be enough  to forge a grand bargain between the Palinistas and the party brass — uniting  the party behind the most unlikely compromise candidate in history.

Call me crazy, but this is a crazy campaign. The entire system is already  turned on its head, so there’s every reason to expect an ending that we  currently see as impossible.

I’ve long been predicting that Governor Palin would eventually be seen as the sensible and pragmatic choice by the majority of the GOP. She of all the candidates and potential candidates has the record and the ability to unite the three wings of the Republican party (military, fiscal, and social).