The thought hit me the other morning: The Donald’s the new Palin!

Doncha know? Just listen and compare. See how they move.

And then ask: Hasn’t he gone rogue? Or pure maverick?

Could they even work as a team?

And to think, it would counter the sexism label he’s attached to himself.

When the Donald brags about being a successful executive, a little context helps. He heads a private company, without any real risk of board intrigue or challenge, and is valued, by independent observers, at $3 billion to $4 billion. We won’t even get into his near bankruptcies.

In contrast, Carly Fiorina headed an $57 billion company that was No. 35 on the Forbes most valued brands list. A company with $109 billion in sales and 302,000 employees. Oh, yes, one that weighed in at No. 19 on the Fortune 500 list.

Want to talk about management insight, then? Especially in a truly competitive world.

He’s got a last name for his first, and a first name for his last.

Any surprise if he has his politics backward?

For as long as I can remember, the Republican Party has had two wings that fit uneasily together – one essentially ideological, claiming a conservative label; the other, more pragmatic, meaning liberal. Think Taft versus Eisenhower. Even so, this was still the party of Lincoln, one way or the other.

And then, when the Southern Strategy landed Nixon in the White House, everything shifted. In the ensuing tilt, few pragmatists are left, and none of them would claim a liberal streak.

What now exists is an uneasy alliance of a core of the rich Wall Street contributors and the Tea Party-related corps of voters whose numbers have kept the GOP in office. (Yes, I know the Wall Street label isn’t quite accurate either, knowing how many of the biggest contributors live in Texas.) As the insightful book What’s Wrong With Kansas wonders, this has often meant electing officials whose policies and beliefs hurt the constituents’ own best interests. It’s been big money, in the end, over middle-class working families and voters.

What’s interesting at the moment is the way Donald Trump has taken control of the presidential primary away from the Wall Street establishment and is playing directly to the street-level party members. In the September 24 New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky denotes two elements the party has been relying on – cultural and racial resentment, combined with spectacle – “the unrelenting push toward a rhetorical style over ever more gladiatorial and ever more outraged …” Or, as he says, “There is a strong tendency, perfected over the years by Fox News, to cover and discuss domestic politics as a combination of war, sport, and entertainment all at once.”

Voila! We have the Donald, who hails from a rival television network – something that has to add to the fury Fox is feeling. (Well, he has turned some of that back on Fox News itself in refusing to be interviewed … which leads to a whole other discussion.)

I’ve long wondered what it would take to split the Republican Party the way, say, abortion rights have weakened the Democrats. Maybe it won’t come down to a particular issue so much as a feeling of betrayal when it comes to a livable income for average American households – which now require two wage-earners, rather than just one as it did when I was growing up. The focus of the war-and-sport outlook just might turn in entertaining ways nobody would have predicted six months ago. Maybe we’ll actually get serious in the aftermath and consider solutions to some very real problems.

Or maybe a long simmering realignment might happen for the parties themselves.

As the presidential gears up here in New Hampshire before the primary, along with the Iowa caucuses, I’m looking at something other than survey numbers. How about some evidence of real energy around a candidate?

On the Republican side, for all of the Donald’s flutter, I’ve seen only one property with Trump signs on the lawn. Just one. And, for that matter, not a single bumper sticker. Does he even have them? As for the others in the race? I’m waiting. (If I didn’t have a schedule conflict a few nights ago, I’d have attended the Donald’s appearance just up the road – but a rally’s not the same as a meet-and-greet, question-and-answer session where we get to size up a candidate. It’s only a special guest appearance.)

Where I do see the grassroots energy is almost entirely with Bernie. Bumper stickers, lawn signs, lapel pins, face-to-face events, canvassers ringing doorbells. All combined with a smoothly functioning organization. At the moment, his camp feels like a party, in fact. Along with the oft-repeated quip, “He’s the one who’s really telling it like it is.”