WASHINGTON

There was Sarah Palin again Monday, assuring Sean Hannity on Fox News that she was not going to be silenced, no matter what abuse might come her way. “Other people are facing much greater hardships and making greater sacrifices than I am in just engaging in debate,” said the woman who reportedly made $250,000 per episode of her recently concluded reality show.

She added, several times, “This isn’t about me.”

A lot of Republicans in Washington certainly wish that were the case. But as the new House majority begins its push this week to scale back the Obama agenda, it seems that the president now has, in Ms. Palin, something he badly needed after a punishing election season: the ideal political foil.

In a new poll from ABC News and The Washington Post, only 30 percent of respondents approved of Ms. Palin’s highly publicized response to the shootings that gravely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others, while 46 percent said they disapproved. By contrast, 78 percent approved of how President Obama handled the incident, compared with just 12 percent who did not.

All of which suggests that the events of the past 10 days have complicated things for Republicans who are intent on getting back to business this week, starting with a push to repeal the new health care law. Speaker John A. Boehner and his lieutenants are clearly trying to learn the lessons of the last Republican takeover, in 1995. They are determined to focus on their substantive disagreements with Mr. Obama, presenting a reasoned alternative to his agenda rather than getting dragged into the kind of personal attacks that ultimately worked against the party back then.