Mitt Romney opening new corporate headquarters in Provo, Utah.-->

Dan Riehl is highly complimentary of Sarah Palin's mastery of new media to become--in his words, Obama's chief antagonist on the right.

The smartest people in the room tend to be early adapters. More than that, they tend to be those that master and successfully exploit the latest of the greatest, the newest of the new. Sarah Palin is the unchallenged, though not unopposed, champion in that regard on the Right for now.

A little more research on Dan's part might have resulted in a different kind of post. Every politician is tweeting and facebooking these days, and Palin's use of these technologies is simply routine at this point.

What is not routine is that Sarah Palin actually writes her own Facebook postings, and that is the extraordinary element of Sarah Palin's political trajectory.

Sarah Palin doesn't fear the electorate.

Contrast that to just about every other politician, including 'my guy' Mitt Romney. I like the way Dan phrased this.

Romney and others stroll halfway down Olympus to write an oped for the Wall Street Journal once in a while, Palin is using a fan blog, Facebook and Twitter to feed and grow her significant influence across the Right on-line.

The conventional wisdom has always been to "stay on message". Presidential campaigns are carefully crafted image-making enterprises, and one must be extremely careful not to disrupt that illusion, or suffer the consequences. This is generally harder for Democrats since their coalition of interest groups is so diverse and feature such contradictory objectives, but its no picnic for Republicans either. Social conservatives are not necessarily fiscal conservatives, and fiscal conservatives are frequently libertarian in their social perspectives.

Sarah Palin's advantage--and its enormous, is that she doesn't have to learn a part--she is the part. In effect, Sarah Palin is a natural distillation of the Reagan coalition, a fiscal and social conservative who says the right thing from instinct rather than coaching. She can post on Facebook with little fear that she'll reveal her inner socialist.

Palin is authentic--true political gold, and it wouldn't matter if she still wrote letters long-hand.

It will be a very interesting next three years...