On the heels of our discussion of whether the Nov. 3 elections were a referendum on Sarah Palin, chew this over: The former Alaska governor has not yet endorsed the more conservative candidate, Marco Rubio, in the Florida primary for governor.

Palin’s spokeswoman Meg Stapleton said it was “too early” for Palin to endorse either Charlie Crist (who is considered more moderate) or Rubio.

I know, I know, it’s very early to be talking about the 2012 race.

But in case you are interested in how the field might shape up, USA Today and Gallup have put out a new poll showing Mike Huckabee at the top of the field among Republicans.

Huckabee himself brushed off such polls.

It’s like speculating who’s going to be the best actor next year when we don’t even know what the movies are.

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has announced that she is running for Democrat Barbara Boxer’s senate seat in California. The economic adviser to John McCain during his run for the White House revealed her plans in an editorial in today’s Orange County Register:

Throughout my career I’ve brought people together, and I’ve solved problems. And that is what is needed in our government today. People who are willing to set aside ego and partisanship and instead work to develop solutions to our problems. . . .

Tax, spend and borrow is not a governing philosophy; it’s a cycle of dependency and it is one that must be broken. Washington must show the discipline to cut spending and create policies that encourage and empower businesses to put people back to work. . . .

Another issue that is center stage on Capitol Hill is health care reform. As a cancer survivor, this is an issue close to my heart. Rather than remaking the entire national health care system at the cost of higher taxes and exploding deficits, we should build on what works, such as expanding access to community clinics that will give those most in need appropriate care at a reasonable price.

Before facing Boxer, Fiorina must first win the Republican primary.

A year ago the world was waiting to see if Americans would elect a president who would bring about sweeping social, cultural, and political change. As Sen. Barack Obama became President Obama it brought a mix of ridiculous expectations and unfounded fears regarding what “Superpresident” would accomplish. I was so captivated by the spectacle of it all after Election Day I committed to attend the presidential inauguration ceremony. I have kept my attendance quiet until now.

Although I strongly disagree with the way House Speaker Nancy Pelosi views America and with many policy initiatives of the Obama administration, in the spirit of honoring the office of president (1 Peter 2:17) and recognizing the legitimacy of government (Romans 13:1), I met family members and friends in Washington, D.C., to witness the transition from President Bush to President Obama. Standing in front of the Washington Monument I felt the magnitude and weight of the office in ways I had not experienced before. It was fantastic to witness all the pomp and circumstance. Watching the procession of congressional leaders, Supreme Court judges, and so on was thrilling. I was particularly surprised by the cold interactions between Presidents Clinton and Carter witnessed by millions on JumboTrons before they took their seats. These two families obviously do not like each other.

Many voters on Election Day and at the inauguration were excited because “change” was coming. We were supposedly ushering in a new era of governance. In the past nine months, however, not much has changed and the Obama administration continues as is normal for Democrats—and for an ever-growing number of Republicans—to expand the tentacles of government into areas where government is neither designed nor equipped to manage. Oddly, there has been much disappointment among many liberals because Obama has not gone far enough in bringing about “change.”

According to The New York Times, Europeans are growing critical of Obama because “Mr. Obama has not broken clearly enough with Bush administration policies that they dislike.” I say if the Europeans are frustrated with Obama, then he must be doing something right. Why then has there not been “change” enough to satisfy liberal critics? The answer is found in the reality check President Obama encountered when his campaign rhetoric was met with real facts about the world and by the independent agenda of Speaker Pelosi.

The Rasmussen Reports‘ daily Presidential Tracking Poll from yesterday showed that 28 percent of the nation’s voters “Strongly Approve” of the way that Barack Obama is performing while 41 percent “Strongly Disapprove,” giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -13. What does this mean? Friends, the Obama honeymoon is over and most people, with the exception of the Nobel Peace Prize committee, are realizing that President Obama is a regular politician. No change, just Washington politics as usual.

After losing high-profile gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, the Democratic Party salvaged the night by winning the New York 23rd District congressional race. In a battle that took on national prominence, Democrat Bill Owens narrowly defeated Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. Republican Dede Scozzafava, who dropped out of the race on Saturday, still captured about 6 percent of the vote.

Republicans have said that this year’s elections are a referendum on President Obama. That might be the case – I would also ask, might this be a referendum on Sarah Palin?

The two Republican gubernatorial campaigns rebuffed Palin’s offers to stump. They won, and largely on independent voters.

Doug Hoffman, the third party candidate in the NY-23 election who Palin endorsed, is by all appearances losing.

Republican Chris Christie has been declared the winner of the governor’s race in the very blue state of New Jersey over Democrat incumbent John Corzine. With three-quarters of the precincts reporting, Christie had 50 percent of the vote, with Corzine taking 44 percent, and Independent candidate Chris Daggett picking up about 5 percent.

Republican Bob McDonnell has easily defeated Democrat Creigh Deeds in Virginia’s race for governor. Emily Belz reports from WORLD’s Washington Bureau:

President Obama was the first Democratic candidate for president to win Virginia since 1964, but that tidal wave of support didn’t course into Tuesday’s governor’s race. Republican Bob McDonnell handily defeated Democrat Creigh Deeds in what conservatives characterized as a referendum on the White House and liberals characterized as an unlucky series of events.

Read Emily’s report in its entirety here.

The GOP appears to be in for a sweep in the Old Dominion, taking the lieutenant governor and attorney general races as well.

Here’s an interesting tidbit to think about on Election Day: Using Polidata projections for the 2010 census, and electoral distribution from the 2004 presidential election, Republican states will grow (in both congressional seats and number of electors to the Electoral College) while Democrat-leaning states will shrink. As analyst and columnist Michael Barone has pointed out, the demographic trends don’t prevent President Barack Obama from being reelected in 2012—

but they would make it marginally more difficult. Demography, modestly, favors the Republicans, and more than modestly over the long haul.

The demographic trend is more significant in light of what Gallup and others are finding regarding individual Americans’ shift to identifying themselves more prevalently as conservative. But as E.J. Dionne has pointed out, “There is a debate over what these ideological labels actually mean to voters.”

Ideas have consequences. Some ideas are mightier than swords. Deadlier too. As Terry Pratchett warns: “Unfortunately, wild and unstable ideas have a disturbing tendency to move around and take hold.” Some of the wildest and most devastating ideas came from Karl Marx. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, those ideas still corrupt American youth. The most vulnerable are students exposed to the influence of anti-capitalist instructors in the fields of economics, philosophy, history, and political science. A multitude of falsehoods thrive in our academic centers where tenured faculty members pass their dogmatic views on to kids who are still thinking mostly with their hearts. They don’t come with horns and pitchforks—some are very nice people, intelligent and full of good intentions, as was a recent Marxist guest speaker at The King’s College.

As millions of people in the former communist countries mourn the victims of practical Marxism, leftists of all flavors are struggling to raise the red banner one more time. Socialist professors and their brainwashed disciples are in the forefront of the fight against American imperialism and economic neo-colonization. Our universities have become hatcheries for anti-globalists trying to persuade the developing nations that breaking their economic links with the West will protect their people from exploitation.

Traditional Marxism has been marginalized but not before it had metastasized. Hoping to catch in their webs as many confused souls as possible, today’s socialists redefine their idol’s ramblings for class struggle to mask it as a fight for race and gender equality. The infiltration of failed ”progressive” ideas diverts civil rights and environmental movements from the real problems of our generation. It is getting so bad that even the president of the United States sees no problem surrounding himself with Maoists.

Those are some of the reasons why, 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, we still cannot celebrate the victory over the “empire of evil.” Yes, socialism is far from dead. We cannot pronounce it dead until it evaporates from those heads where the lies of the omniscience and omnipotence of government still reside. One thing we need to teach our children is that for democracy to really mean freedom and not a dictatorship of special interests, it cannot coexist with pervasive bureaucratic control of our economic affairs.