For all of the jokes and snickering about Sarah Palin and her lack of knowledge about politics and policy, consider this. Girl is getting paid and in a major, major way. For her 45 minute appearance at tonight’s “Tea Party Convention” she will drop a check for $125,000 into her back account. That’s more than she made in a year as governor of Alaska. With an entry fee of over $500, however, the event will be light on those who are actually supposed to constitute the whole “tea bag” movement, the regular Joes and Janes who drive their flag adorned camper vans filled with “Obama the African Lyin’ King” posters from protest event to protest event. Instead it’s a conference for high rollers who want to associate themselves with the movement people who won’t actually be present, let alone represented. It will be like calling an event a black empowerment conference and hiring Jesse Jackson to address a room full of rich white people who want to look like they care. But girl is getting paid and in a major, major way.

Then consider her book. It was written to sell to all those folks in the camper vans and their ilk who consider her a leader and want to hear what she has to say- or rather want to hear her say what they want to say and are sure she wants to say too. But, given her notorious inexperience with the written word, she had Lynn Vincent, a features writer for the uber-conservative World Magazine, write it for her. We can’t know what Vincent’s deal with Palin was, but we can bet pretty safely that it’s a paltry percentage of Palin’s reported $7 million haul.

Lastly, consider her gig at Fox News for which she’s clearly also getting a very fat paycheck. Fox and company are probably smart enough to know that Palin’s value is in direct correlation to her scarcity. The more she’s on the screen, the less valuable she’ll become and they must know that it’s only a matter of time before she’ll say something mind blowingly stupid that will blow her whole deal. Fox’s answer to Rachel Maddow she is clearly not, but she obviously knows this and has zero interest in wading through policy details or masterbating into a microphone for three hours like her pal Limbaugh.

But perhaps she and her snowmobile husband have figured all this out too? Perhaps, after having been through it once and being a national laughingstock, they have zero interest in running for a public office again. Perhaps they know the smart play is to cash in as much as possible while she’s hot enough to command these big checks and before she is relegated, as she most surely will be, to the Ross Perot/Monica Lewinsky pantheon of “used to be’s.” Until then, girl is going to get paid and in a major, major way.

So who’s the real idiot here?

As Barack Obama wrapped up his State of the Union speech, and ends his first year as our president, it’s more and more clear that not only was he our first African American president, he is our first real amateur. He was really is the first outsider, the first rabble-rouser, to actually ride the backs of voters roughshod over the establishment, at least those parts of it who didn’t get a clue and join the bandwagon, all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Normally a person with so threadbare a resume would never have made it to the Oval Office but a perfect storm- a crash and burn predecessor, a terrific campaign and great speeches and the meltdown of the Clinton machine- put him there. And, of course, the Internet. We the people ponied up online and provided him with such an enormous war chest that he literally didn’t even know what to do with it all. It was an exciting ride with a thrilling conclusion…but then what?

According to the book Game Change, when his wife Michelle asked him why he wanted to run for president his first response centered around the historic accomplishment his victory would be and the impact it would have on black youth in America to see a black man as president. Oh yeah, and he could also “fix stuff,” primarily foreign policy. His thinking was in broad, conceptual strokes- justice, fairness and “change.” Never short of self esteem, he probably thought he could do it all. The problem was, lacking virtually any Washington experience, instead of getting out front he decided to rely on the cooperation of others who all have their own agendas and were not nearly as enamored with him as he and the folks at rallies were. The people who make it to Washington have long knives and even longer memories.

For the Republican party the gameplan for Obama was very simple. Arriving as he did on an unprecedented wave of popular support, if he stepped up he could be another FDR and they would face a generation in the wilderness. Their only play was simply to do everything they could to obstruct anything he suggested no matter what it was and then throw the bucket of old liberal labels on him and try to make them stick. So far, “just saying NO” has worked very well for them.

Obama can credit a good deal of the problems he now faces to his choice of Rahm Emanuel to be the action yin to his intellectual yang. Rahm, he of the “don’t let a crisis go to waste” school of thought was supposed to be Obama’s experienced enforcer with congress. Many envisioned Rahm, using the wind of popular support at his back as a counter to lobbiest leverage and channeling Lyndon Johnson as he brought members and staff into the Roosevelt room to be given their scripts for the coming Obama Passion Play to change America. It didn’t work out that way and Rahm has been a disaster and instead of Batman and Captain America we just got a couple more suits playing by the house rules at the Washington gaming tables. And perhaps most inexplicably of all, they let Nancy Pelosi, an anathema to most Americans, deal the cards.

So here we are a year later. Instead of riding into Washington to shake things up, Barack Obama has instead simply become a member of the band that plays the same ol’ tunes, with the Wall Street Shuffle featuring high on the play list as it always is. It would have been almost impossible to make any other play because, as James Carville noted, “Washington always wins.” But worse still, Obama has showed a shockingly tin political ear. Rather than leading the bipartisan revolution he naively promised, he let Pelosi run with the ball and then allowed himself to be painted with the old Tax and Spend Socialism/Soft on National Defense brush that covers her and which leaves a stain that is almost impossible to remove. His stunning lack of ability to define himself, and unbelievable optic mistakes like setting up a teleprompter to address a third grade class, has resulted in him being easily defined by those eager to see him run out of town in three years. If he doesn’t step forward forcefully, leave the Democratic establishment behind and pull himself into focus for the American people soon- and stand up for something other than settling for the lowest common denominator- that is probably exactly what is going to happen.