Why Dismissals of Palin are Extremely Premature

            Sarah Palin is riding high on her current book tour.  The book, “Going Rogue,” is not the reason.  Ms. Palin could have published a book of children’s rhymes and still gotten the same reception she is getting at her non-campaign stops (she isn’t running for anything, and, in fact, isn’t even an elected office holder at this point) across the heartland of America.

            Pundits of all political stripes this side of Fox News are convinced she has reached her high water mark.  They see her drifting into a Dan Quayle state of political nothingness as soon as the excitement of her best-selling “tell all” memoir wears off.  They are wrong.

            The “Palin Phenomenon” is not going away anytime soon.  In fact, despite every practical reason why she should not get even close to a presidential nomination in 2012, the odds at this point favor just such a possibility.

            Ms. Palin is viewed as a joke by the mainstream media, and by every traditional measurement, she should be.  Her campaign for vice-president would have been a complete embarrassment were it not for the instant love affair she formed with her constituency.  That constituency might best be described as a mix of lower middle class soccer moms, mid-American Christian fundamentalists, and ultra-right rank-and-file Republicans.

            Those folks flocked to Palin as if she were the next best thing to the second coming (of Christ), an event many may secretly believe she pre-ordains.  They refuse to see the woman as she is, instead envisioning her as a modern-day Ronald Reagan (another icon about whom the reality is far less rosy than the image) who has come, as they would assert Reagan did thirty years earlier, to save the country from a Godless socialist agenda, promulgated by a cabal of anti-Americans.

            In other words, the Palin troops (already more than willing to do whatever they need to do to get her elected) are your common everyday tea-baggers: political know-nothings, who are mad as Hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.  That kind of passion is gold in politics, as someone named Barack Obama proved only a little more than a year ago.

            Absent that passion, the assertion that Palin has no political future would be entirely correct.  Consider the argument that the pundits make. 

1.  She has shown no ability to grasp the major substantive issues of the day, and, from all indications, she has no interest in doing so.  Over a year after her unveiling as a governor who thought she had foreign policy expertise because she could see Russia from her state, she still doesn’t show any more understanding of the world scene. 

In a recent interview with Sean Hannity (hardly a hostile questioner), she continually confused Iran with Iraq.  (Hannity ignored the mistakes, rather than calling attention to them by correcting her.)

2.  Midway through her first term as a governor, she resigned, incomprehensibly claiming she was not a quitter as she did so.  That kind of political suicide makes “You won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore” look like a brilliant strategic statement.

3.  She is still engaged in a silly finger-pointing exercise with members of the McCain staff.  These attacks are aimed at folks most people have never heard of.  They do nothing to enhance Palin’s status within her party.  Quite the contrary, they suggest she would have great difficulty assembling a professional political team.

4.  The insiders in her own party see her as unelectable.  They don’t trust her (the maverick label can work both ways), and they don’t want to let her take their party even further into the abyss.  They can be counted on to mount a fervent “anyone but Palin” campaign, to avoid letting her take control of their party.

5.  Democrats would pounce all over her in a general campaign.  Were she running for president, the gloves would come off.  Instead of treating her with bemused respect, as they did in the last election, they would come at her with everything available (and there would be plenty) to show she was completely unqualified to have her finger on the nuclear button. 

            But passion counts for a lot in politics, especially when the politician eliciting that passion is loaded with charisma, as Palin most definitely is. 

            So, what’s the likely scenario leading to a Palin presidential nomination in 2012?  It starts with a continuing economic crisis, or at least an economy that can be interpreted as being in deep trouble.  If unemployment is still hovering near 10% two years from now, the number of disgruntled voters (even a large swath of ’08 Obama voters) will be ripe for the plucking by a Palin insurgency.

            The initial viability of a Palin candidacy would probably be dependent on the 2010 mid-term election results.  Ms. Palin would need to support a handful of upstart nominees who wrested Congressional seats from Democrats: the kind of wins that would get national headlines.  If she were seen on election night and in the days thereafter standing with anti-establishment, ultra-right victors whom she had supported, her political stock would suddenly soar.

            It would be propelled by the absence of any strong mainstream contenders within the Republican Party.  That eventuality is not hard to envision.  Recall that John McCain emerged as the nominee last year despite having far from commanding support within his party.  He won the nomination primarily because no one else claimed the party’s base.  Palin, engendering a lot more passion than McCain ever did, would be much more likely to jump ahead in an otherwise lackluster field.

            Of course, this quasi-prognostication could prove to be laughable as events unfold in the months ahead.  Ms. Palin may well continue to slip on her own ineptitude as a politician.  Ironically, though, the more she slips, the more endeared she becomes to that angry, know-nothing base. 

             And if that base continues to grow, if, perchance, President Obama through his own slips (for which the electorate will be a lot less understanding) increases the size of that base, then all bets are off, no matter what the pundits are currently claiming.