From left to right, Slate magazine's Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson and David Plotz discuss political issues during Wednesday's live Political Gabfest in Ann Arbor.

Ryan J. Stanton | AnnArbor.com

Slate magazine political correspondent John Dickerson says Sarah Palin ranks up there with marketing behemoths like Apple, Nike and Coca-Cola when it comes to brand management.

He found that out firsthand this week.

It seems Palin won't allow even the smallest voice of dissent on her Facebook page, Dickerson told a crowd of several hundred Wednesday night at the University of Michigan Law School.

"Within three minutes, it had been deleted," Dickerson said of a comment he left on one of Palin's posts on Facebook. "I wrote it in as anodyne and mild a fashion as possible."

Dickerson said his comment was an attempt to clarify facts surrounding Palin's post blasting Wall Street Journal reporter Sudeep Reddy. The reporter had asserted Palin got her facts wrong in a recent speech when she said grocery prices had risen significantly over the past year or so.

In her Facebook post, Palin asked whether Reddy even reads his own paper and pointed to a Wall Street Journal article to back up her statements. Dickerson said he attempted to jump in and point out the article Palin referenced actually says prices are only "beginning" to rise — and the time period of "significant" increase Palin talks about is referred to in the article as "the tamest year of food pricing in nearly two decades."

"Anyway, so I posted it again to see if there was a glitch or something like that, and it was gone again in two minutes," Dickerson said of his comment on Palin's page. "I knew they watched these Facebook postings really, really closely … but dissenting opinion also gets taken out."

Dickerson was joined by colleagues Emily Bazelon and David Plotz as the voices behind Slate's popular Political Gabfest. They took their show on the road in Ann Arbor on Wednesday.

During an hour-long podcast, the three pundits kept the crowd laughing as they riffed on Palin, the 2010 mid-term elections and the presidencies of Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

The 350-seat lecture space inside Hutchins Hall was filled to capacity, while dozens more spilled into overflow rooms to watch a live video feed.

• Click here for Slate's Political Gabfest feed.

Staying on the topic of Palin, an audience member asked the panelists whether they thought Palin stood a chance at winning the presidency in 2012. Dickerson said Palin turns off too many people even within the Republican Party, and many people see her as unqualified.

"She has very, very, very high negatives," he said. "She has high negatives inside the Republican Party. She has high negatives in the larger part of the country. She has high negatives in states like this where she needs to get the vote. She does nothing so far that does anything to drive those negatives down. The negatives only go up."

Dickerson touched on the reasoning behind bringing Political Gabfest to Ann Arbor. He said it made sense to head to the industrial Midwest one week after Republicans made strong gains in political battlegrounds where Democrats have dominated in recent times.

"They lost in all of the Rust Belt states: Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania," he said, predicting those states will be political battlegrounds in the next two years.

Plotz said the outcome of the mid-term elections may seem surprising.

"Particularly, if you look at Michigan, you have a state which is heavily unionized, you have a state where there was a huge amount of money poured in through the auto bailouts, as well as through the stimulus bill," he said, concluding that "President Obama and the Democrats seem to have accrued exactly zero benefit from any of that."

Plotz said he thinks President George W. Bush caused "terrible damage" to America and the country's reputation across the globe.

Ryan J. Stanton | AnnArbor.com

Plotz said it's not an irreparable loss for Democrats, but the remapping of congressional districts with the Republicans in control is sure to hurt them. It's also expected that Michigan will lose one congressional seat, dropping from 15 to 14.

"The congressional districts throughout this area are going to be redrawn by Republicans to screw Democrats, and that's going to be bad for them," Plotz said.

Plotz said the success of the Democrats in 2012 will be highly contingent on showing some economic progress. He said if Obama can put forth economic policies that seem like they're benefiting Michigan and other Rust Belt states, the party will benefit.

Bazelon said Obama seems "aloof" and hasn't said anything "that feels real."

"I mean, Obama isn't going to say, 'There just are no jobs. I tried really hard. I failed.' Right? You can't say that," she said.

Bazelon said she wonders whether Obama is just not a populist at a time when the United States needs a populist leader to believe in.

"It can motivate people to do amazing things, to see something larger than their own self interests," she said, noting that FDR was a populist.

"In a way, Hitler was a populist," Plotz responded, drawing laughs.

Bazelon offered her predictions for the next two years, saying she expects Republicans in Washington "to cause as much trouble as they possibly can."

"They were talking about exactly how they could, if not repeal health care reform, at least try to kind of throw a wrench in the works from the inside by defunding certain parts of it," she said. "That doesn't even seem to me like a political winner for them in terms of reaching out to independents and moderates. I mean, it's really for their base."

Both Plotz and Dickerson said Obama has been wrongly blamed for actions taken by Bush.

"Forty-seven percent of the country thinks that President Obama initiated TARP, and only 34 percent think President Bush did," Dickerson said.

Ryan J. Stanton covers government and politics for AnnArbor.com. Reach him at ryanstanton@annarbor.com or 734-623-2529.