In a recent issue, The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson wrote a very long (nearly 9,000 word) profile of Indiana's extraordinarily popular, albeit wonkish, Republican Gov., Mitch Daniels. The piece was clearly designed to be a buzz-starter for Daniels' possible 2012 White House run.

The profile springs from a long tradition of political magazine writing, where scribes spend off years sniffing around political quarters in search of possible dark horse contenders for the next presidential run. Those who hit gold earn Beltway gold stars from fellow journalists for having the foresight to have peeked into the future and spotted a rising star.

And in this case, Ferguson's friendly profile clearly represents an early bet of sorts that Daniels may be a major player in 2012.

But what's interesting about the profile is how Ferguson managed to completely ignore the media landscape that Daniels would have to navigate in 2012; how Ferguson ignored the awkward fact that GOP contenders will have to run their campaigns through Fox News and, to a certain extent, through Rush Limbaugh.

In that regard, Ferguson's Weekly Standard piece is sort of quaint in that it refuses to acknowledge Fox News and Limbaugh now are the GOP in terms of king makers, which means non-right-wingers, and non-Tea Party cheerleaders, such as Daniels, face an enormous tactical disadvantage. (In The Weekly Standard piece about Daniels, the words “Beck,” “Limbaugh,” and “Fox News” do not appear once.)

In previous campaigns there existed various viable, non-traditional campaign paths to the White House for potential candidates like Daniels to take. (That didn't mean they would be successful; just that the campaigns could be launched.) But in 2012, all GOP roads to the White House will run through Fox News, and there is simply no way that a serious man like Daniels who doesn't embrace a radical hatred of the president and who doesn't suggest that America is teetering on socialism/communism (i.e. Daniels is a traditional, conservative Republican), is going to get any love from Fox News' Tea Party cheerleaders.

There's no way a candidate like Daniels will get any oxygen within the GOP primaries if he's not sanctioned by Fox News. And he won't be.

For Weekly Standard writers interested in handicapping the 2012 race, it might be time to acknowledge that Fox News is the Opposition Party, no matter how painful that realization may be.