Today, we’ve got Mr.-1-Percent-In-The-Polls Jon Huntsman lecturing the Republican electorate which is uninterested in voting for him as to who’s electable and who’s not…

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman criticized Texas Gov.Rick Perry for expressing skepticism about man-made global warming and for criticizing Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central banker.

“I think when you find yourself at an extreme end of the Republican Party, you make yourself unelectable,” Huntsman said today on ABC’s “This Week.”

Huntsman also ridiculed Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., for claiming that that she could bring gasoline prices below $2 if elected president.

“I just don’t know what world that comment would come from. … That is completely unrealistic. And, again, it’s talking about things that, you know, may pander to a particular group or sound good at the time, but it just simply is not founded in reality.”

Huntsman said his Republican rivals as well as President Barack Obama are on the political “fringes.” Huntsman says Obama is too liberal and there are Republican candidates who are too far to the right and have “zero substance.”

Interestingly enough, there’s a poll out on the subject today. Gallup did it. And of course they didn’t poll Huntsman against his old boss Barack Obama – because were Gallup to do that they’d need to poll on everybody else in the GOP race who has zero support – but they did poll three candidates Huntsman thinks are fringe against the president.

Guess what they found?

Isn’t that something? Perry’s tied with Obama among registered voters, Bachmann’s within four points and Ron Paul is within two.

Yes, Mitt Romney is two points up on Obama. There was never much doubt that Romney could beat Obama (well, there was, when Obamacare rather than the S&P downgrade and the hideous Obama economy was the major issue in the campaign); the issue is whether it’s smart to run a guy who’s an unreliable conservative when someone who’s an unmistakable conservative could win just as easily.

We think Romney would have beaten Obama back in 2008. It took an abysmal campaign by John McCain – whose longtime chief strategist John Weaver is currently running Huntsman’s clown show – to lose a race to a guy from Jeremiah Wright’s church.

Of course, Rasmussen does have a poll out identifying somebody who really is unelectable the way things are at present…

Will she or won’t she? Sarah Palin has a busy schedule leading up to a major public event in Iowa on September 3, and Republican insider Karl Rove predicts she’s about to enter the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

If Election Day was right now, President Obama would defeat the former Alaska governor 50% to 33%, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. This marks the first time that the president has risen out of the 40s in hypothetical matchups with any of the major GOP presidential hopefuls. Fifteen percent (15%) prefer some other candidate, and two percent (2%) are undecided.

We’ve been saying since last week that Rove’s name-dropping of Chris Christie, Paul Ryan and now Palin is nothing but a throw-stuff-at-the-wall attempt to keep potential Perry donors from committing as he launches his campaign. Now that Ryan eschewed a run today and Christie pretty much continued to deny that he was getting in, we feel pretty good about that analysis.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air is reading the tea leaves and coming to the conclusion that for all the dabbling in Iowa Palin is doing she’s not going to run, and we think that’s correct. In fact, the odds aren’t horrible that Palin will throw in for Perry at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Where does that leave Rove? We know where it leaves Huntsman. Why doesn’t Huntsman just leave, anyway?