On Fox News this morning Sen. Saxby Chambliss went out of his way to credit Sarah Palin for helping to put him over the top in his runoff against Jim Martin. We can now count Chambliss and in the bag for Palin and her Overhyped Express bid for president in 2012.

Chambliss said of Palin, “I can’t overstate the impact she had down here. When she walks in a room, folks just explode, and they really did pack the house everywhere we went. She’s a dynamic lady, a great administrator, and I think she’s got a great future in the Republican Party.” He also made it a point to single out her campaigning for him as more valuable than that of McCain, Huckabee, Romney, and Giuliani, “We had John McCain and Mike Huckabee and Gov. Romney and Rudy Giuliani, but Sarah Palin came in on the last day, did a fly-around and, man, she was dynamite.”

So what we have learned is that Sarah Palin can go into a Republican state, which she already won as the vice presidential candidate, and help an incumbent who forced into a runoff by falling two tenths of a point short of an election night win. This wasn’t exactly a show of political force by Palin and the Republicans. In fact, it was a foregone conclusion in both parties that Chambliss would win the runoff. The logic is that if Martin could not beat Chambliss with the help of having Obama at the top of the ticket, the odds of him defeating the incumbent one on one was slim.

When you add to this the fact that turnout is usually abysmally, and consists of the party diehards, then it should make everyone question how much of an impact Palin could have had in a race that was in the bag for the GOP. What is going on here is that some in the Republican Party are trying to give Palin credit that she doesn’t really deserve for the purposes of building her up to become the party leader and challenge Obama in 2012.

Her campaigning in Georgia once again demonstrated that her appeal is limited to Republicans and red states. A real show of strength would be if Palin helped a Republican defeat a Democratic incumbent, but this is unlikely to happen, so Republicans like Saxby Chambliss, who apparently has learned nothing from his party’s last two election defeats, continue to tout Sarah Palin, who is an Alaska version of George W. Bush. If the GOP does run Palin against Obama, she will lose badly, and it will be another sign that the Republican Party is still in denial, and unwilling to admit that it has to change.

Quotes came from Politico