It's not easy managing a 24 hour campaign to oppose President Obama. Sometimes when you you pack all that blatant politicking, anti-government fearmongering, and tea-party promoting into one network, the cracks will start to show. We've already begun to see this with the network's growing tension with Glenn Beck. And as we move towards the 2012 elections, Fox's infighting is bound to increase as the network decides how to handle five of their employees running against each other for the Republican nomination for president.

Well, we may have seen the first salvo in the 2012 Fox News Primary. Fox News contributor Karl Rove recently told the Daily Telegraph (also a News Corp. product) that Sarah Palin's new Discovery Channel show does not fit “in the American calculus of 'that helps me see you in the Oval Office',” and went on to suggest she does not have the “gravitas” for the job.

From the article, titled, “Karl Rove questions Sarah Palin's suitability for president”:

“With all due candour, appearing on your own reality show on the Discovery Channel, I am not certain how that fits in the American calculus of 'that helps me see you in the Oval Office',” Mr Rove told The Daily Telegraph in an interview.

He added that the promotional clip for Sarah Palin's Alaska could be especially detrimental to any political campaign. It features the mother of five in the great outdoors saying: “I would rather be doing this than in some stuffy old political office.”

Mr Rove, who remains a major force on the US political scene, also implied that Mrs Palin lacked the stomach for the rigours of a presidential primary campaign, which will begin early next year before the first polls in 2012.

Mr Rove was asked if the 46-year-old Mrs Palin, who is among the front-runners for the next Republican nomination, would be a wise choice if the party wanted to seize the White House from President Barack Obama. He replied: “You can make a plausible case for any of them on paper, but it is not going to be paper in 2011. It's going to be blood, it's going to be sweat and tears and it's going to be hard effort.”

He said Mrs Palin had done a “terrific job” in 2008 when Senator John McCain took her from near obscurity to the vice-presidential nomination, but added: “Being the vice-presidential nominee on the ticket is different from saying 'I want to be the person at the top of the ticket'.

”There are high standards that the American people have for it [the presidency] and they require a certain level of gravitas, and they want to look at the candidate and say 'that candidate is doing things that gives me confidence that they are up to the most demanding job in the world'."

So far, Fox has dealt with their increased infighting by pretending it doesn't exist, but other conservatives aren't so eager to let this transgression go. HotAir's Allahpundit already penned a post asking if, in the wake of his previous -- if inconsistent -- criticisms of Delaware senatorial candidate Christine O'Donnell, Rove is "trying to alienate grassroots conservatives." So it doesn't look like this issue is going to go away.

For years Fox has been working on its unholy hybrid of news analysis and political campaigning; soon it will have to deal the monster it created.