I think the Repubs decided that Sarah Palin and her ilk were a little too stridently ignorant to be elected.

Lou Dobbs puts a ‘moderate’ ‘reasonable’ veneer on his racism. He sucked my Dad in. My Dad is a very smart, progressive guy. But he got sucked in by the early incarnation of Lou Dobbs, with his ‘concern’ for the middle class, jobs going overseas, etc.
At that time, Lou’s face was supposedly one of populism. When Lou turned up the volume of his racism, my father stopped watching him. But he influenced my father who now expresses some anti-immigrant sentiment.

Dobb’s danger is that he is so “reasonable” . I guess so if you compare him to Palin and Glenn Beck. I think Dobbs would win if he runs, a lot of people don’t know that he is in the same barrel as Glenn Beck and O’Reilly.