On the off chance that there are a still a few people reading this neglected blog, I find myself compelled to comment on the surprising events of the weekend.

I haven't known what to expect from Sarah Palin, but I certainly didn't expect this. Less than two years into her mandate, she resigns as governor of Alaska, for no apparently rational reason that I or anyone else can make sense of.

The Democrats, in spite of their dismissive rhetoric, are scared to death of Sarah Palin--she's a nightmare scenario promising to hoist them on their own petard--a populist candidate who appeals to the part of the country that didn't go to an Ivy League school, but does go to church every Sunday (and sometimes more often...). One can hardly blame them for trying to nibble her to death with an unrelenting succession of mini-scandals.

The strategic question--if there is one, is whether Palin is essentially throwing a wrench into the Democrat's smear machinery, or surrendering to it. So let's look at propositions and the facts that support them.

1. Palin's a Genius. There is no further political benefit to Sarah Palin's Alaskan governorship. She transcended the political benefits of the office when she ran as McCain's running mate. The media is never going to cover her as a "good governor", preferring to focus on why the windows in her house are made by the same company that made the windows for the Wasilla civic center. By leaving now, she gives herself three years to win the nomination and go head to head with Obama in 2012. Her PAC is well-funded and her polls suggests she has huge favorables among people who go to church but didn't attend an Ivy League school.

The argument has always been that Palin needs more "seasoning", or in other words, she needs to build her appeal with the swells. Don't hold you breath waiting for that to happen. Palin has taken a page from Obama's book and decided to strike while the iron is hot. Considering how easily Obama fooled the American people into thinking he was a moderate, she seems well-supported in that view.

2. Palin's an Idiot. Palin's resignation was an emotional reaction to pressure, and demonstrate her unsuitability for higher office. Her resignation speech certainly gives legs to this version. By giving up the governship, she casts away her best chance of establishing executive bona fides with the electorate. She's young and should bide her time, accumulating credibility the way Hillary Clinton has.

The truth is probably a little of both--Palin's speech was uneven, but so are most of her speeches. It might embarrass Katy Couric, but her base loves her for her plain-spokenness. Harry Truman, much admired now, but much maligned in his time, talked of turnip harvesting in one of his speeches, reminding real Americans that he was one of them and not some ass from Manhattan.

I think Palin was probably right to dump the governorship--you can't run a presidential campaign from Anchorage, and there is no more to be gained from the office for her personally. Whether a Palin candidacy is a good thing or not is a completely different matter.

Palin appeal is based on her class, and while its possible to win the presidency on that basis, you can't have an enduring conservative political legacy using that strategy. I hate to characterize the current political and economic crisis as an "opportunity", but that's what it is--a chance for the current generation of voters to observe first hand the devastating effects of socialism. The next Republican candidate has a chance to set the country on a path to prosperity and economic justice for a generation.

...but not if its Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin generates more emotion than any American politician. That's because it's hard to invent a character more threatening to modern liberals and their faux-conservative pets like Colin Powell. She's authentic, they're cosmetic; she's fertile, they're sterile; she's brave, they have bravado; she smiles, they sneer; she hunts, they snare; she has natural intelligence, they have a law degree; she believes in God, they believe in Obama. Look at her experience - from nothing to mayor to governor to vp nominee; mother of a soldier, mother of an unwed mother, mother of a Down's baby, grandmother, beauty queen, hoopster, hunter, journalist, wife, businesswoman, icon. She overshadows Obama even when he's meeting Putin - ok I'll sling in the obvious on auto-pilot: suppose Palin had said "President Putin".

The woman is a rebuke to everything that modern liberals cherish and they know it and loath it as they loath the truth about themselves. Their religion is growth through gratification and approval; she embodies duty, service and parental love; she's a follower of Christ, damn it. She believes that stuff. She has a servant's heart.

The most telling meme against her isn't that she's a quitter. Her whole life refutes that. It's her supposed inadequacy in the politics of the wider world. Well her understanding of economics is as complete as it needs to be:

"President Obama is growing government outrageously, and it's immoral and it's uneconomic, his plan that he tries to sell America. His plan to "put America on the right track" economically, incurring the debt that our nation is incurring, trillions of dollars that we're passing on to our kids, expecting them to pay off for us, is immoral and doesn't even make economic sense."

John Fund's column at the Wallstreet Journal provides metrics for what has been apparent as soon as Palin was declared McCain's running mate--raw, naked fear among Democrats has resulted in a concerted effort to destroy this woman by any means available.

This situation developed because Alaska's transparency laws allow anyone to file Freedom of Information Act requests. While normally useful, in the hands of political opponents FOIA requests can become a means to bog down a target in a bureaucratic quagmire, thanks to the need to comb through records and respond by a strict timetable. Similarly, ethics investigations are easily triggered and can drag on for months even if the initial complaint is flimsy. Since Ms. Palin returned to Alaska after the 2008 campaign, some 150 FOIA requests have been filed and her office has been targeted for investigation by everyone from the FBI to the Alaska legislature. Most have centered on Ms. Palin's use of government resources, and to date have turned up little save for a few state trips that she agreed to reimburse the state for because her children had accompanied her. In the process, though, she accumulated $500,000 in legal fees in just the last nine months, and knew the bill would grow ever larger in the future.

None of this changes the analysis--the utility of Palin's governor ship was at an end, and she was both morally and strategically correct in resigning. She in effect has created for herself a modern legend of Cincinnatus--a Roman given dictatorial powers who then relinquished them after a mere sixteen days after defeating the Aequians.

Still, in spite of my personal approval of Mrs. Palin, I worry about her presumable candidacy in 2012. I've heard a lot of people laud her for her "true conservativism", which is code for "she's one of us...", but not much analysis on why that's a winning formula in 2012.

Let me relate an observation I've made.

I was in Moab this past weekend with the lovely bunny, and in the cottage next to mine, was a nice young couple from North Carolina with their two very young children. What struck me was how indistinguishable this young Christian couple was from the similar young Mormon couples staying at the camp site. Their values, outlook, appearance and even speech, were nearly identical and yet Mitt Romney can never win the Presidency because Evangelicals hate Mormons.

Two contradictory realities which illustrate something important about politics--the slightest differences can and will be exploited by political rivals to divide and conquer. Sarah Palin is already an extremely divisive figure, which is less her fault than a predetermined outcome. How does a polarizing figure win? How does a polarizing figure unite a country actively being segmented into feuding factions for the benefit of the cynical power elite?

With a significantly large enough crisis, you can do it, if temporarily (as George W. Bush demonstrated), but what the country needs is an object lesson. I just don't see Sarah Palin teaching the country that lesson. She doesn't have the experience, and most importantly, she isn't sufficiently articulate to really make use of the President's bully pulpit.

Reagan was, so the legend goes, a "true conservative", but politically that was less important than his skills as a communicator. He articulated conservative principles in an attractive and compelling way. People didn't hear conservative rhetoric, they heard explanations that made sense to them. Governor Palin, for all her virtues and talents, is more Dubya than Reagan (although Bush certainly got better with time...).

In my view there is only one candidate who can address the economic crisis engineered by the Democrats--Mitt Romney. Not only does he have the experience, political and leadership skills, he can talk to the country about economics--walking and chewing gum at the same time.

Palin has promise, but she need schoolin'.

I was intrigued by Sarah Palin's Wallstreet Journal editorial on Obama's healthcare plan--less for its arguments than for its tone and style. She isn't articulating any particularly new insights, but she what she succeeds in doing is nothing short of remarkable in the current political climate.

She herself alludes to it by quoting Obama.

President Barack Obama asked that Americans "talk with one another, and not over one another" as our health-care debate moves forward.

Obama of course, doesn't take his own rhetoric seriously--he speaks the fallacy, but doesn't commit it. Every action and utterance on this issue by the administration is designed to obfuscate, confuse and distract--ram the legislation through before anyone has time to read it, "retool" the message to make it appear to be something other than what it is--anything to prevent the American people from having a real debate about this issue.

I can't blame him really--this country, or any other, doesn't run on rational debate, but cultural instinct. The American culture rejects the leviathan approach to government and no amount of allegedly "rational" debate is going to change that. Just as with questions of race and religion, a generation has to pass away before a new paradigm can take hold. That presumes of course that our culture instincts are wrong, which I have good, rational reasons for believing that they aren't. I've lived in several countries other than this one, and American cultural instincts are distinctly correct in many if not most cases, and where I might quibble that they aren't, I would have to concede that it is probably not possible to change one aspect of the culture to get a specific result, without in turn affecting everything else.

but I digress...

Sarah Palin's super-power is her perfect pitch on the core elements of American culture, but just as Superman can fly AND has X-ray vision, Palin compliments her cultural harmony with an ability to talk about the issues in a clear, concise and remarkably relevant way.

Now look at one way Mr. Obama wants to eliminate inefficiency and waste: He's asked Congress to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. In an interview with the New York Times in April, the president suggested that such a group, working outside of "normal political channels," should guide decisions regarding that "huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . . ."

Given such statements, is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats' proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by—dare I say it—death panels? Establishment voices dismissed that phrase, but it rang true for many Americans. Working through "normal political channels," they made themselves heard, and as a result Congress will likely reject a wrong-headed proposal to authorize end-of-life counseling in this cost-cutting context. But the fact remains that the Democrats' proposals would still empower unelected bureaucrats to make decisions affecting life or death health-care matters. Such government overreaching is what we've come to expect from this administration.

I don't know if she wrote this, and frankly I doubt she did, but it nevertheless reflects her style. This is ho hum when a pundit writes it, but for someone with serious political ambitions, its an incredibly frank statement of reality. That in turn makes it a very powerful statement because its going to get attention that the musings of the pundit class never will.

It will resonate with and boost the morale of the many Americans who agree with her, and force Obama's surrogates to respond. Since they can't respond with commensurate frankness, they find themselves every further back on their heels than they have been.

This quality in Gov. Palin, if its consistent, is--dare I say it?--Reaganesque in character. She has made a remarkable connection with voters, and if she keeps this up, she'll make a personal connection with a lot more of them.

Democrat hit teams are no fools--they recognize the danger Gov. Palin represents and are actively trying to recast her image--ironically as a typical liberal politician! These efforts will intensify. How she deals with this will largely determine her future.

Assuming that she doesn't fumble the ball, Gov. Palin is a potential world-beater. As much as I respect Mitt Romney's Olympian (pun intended) capabilities, he simply lacks the political talent embodied in Sarah Palin. She can learn to be a President, but I don't think Mitt can learn what Sarah knows in her bones.

How this shakes out, I can't say, but I hope they can work together.

Normally I skip the turgid prose, turgid minds, turgid souls and turgid politics of liberal websites like Huffpo and Kos. There's a Newspeak dishonesty about them too which soils by association - "Abortion is a woman's right to choose"; AGW sceptics are "Climate Change deniers". They usually argue in bad faith and state what they want to be true as tho it were true - dull, dirty stuff that stinks up public discourse. But when liberals start knifing each other it can be entertaining:

Pour some more butter on the popcorn . . .

...George Will:

It's striking to me how the pundits I like best, George Will (Oxford, Princeton) and Charles Krauthammer (Oxford, Harvard), reject Sarah Palin as not smart enough, inexperienced, policy light, whereas another very smart pundit, Mark Steyn, is pretty pro-Palin, like me, while reserving some judgement, like me.

How come?

Well it's obvious what George and Charles have in common. They're both dry, cerebral, irreligious, disabused, fluent, efficient in word and thought and I like that. Steyn and Adams are both Marks, they both have curly hair, they're both playful with words and both educated at English public (ie private) schools. Neither Mark went to university; Steyn was a disc-jockey at 18, Adams took a Classics Exhibition to Cambridge at 16, then changed his mind and hitch hiked off to an improbable future. I postulate that George and Charles simply can't get past their academic bias in judging Palin, whereas the Marks have a broader band experience of the whole world, especially of self-made achievers, and can sense excellence in Palin for which Oxford/Harvard types have narrow band receptors. That excellence is courage, "the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others" as pointed out by by another English public schoolboy who didn't go to university.

Comment on Will's terrific CPAC speech:

And here's some Steyn:

Governor Palin is not merely..."all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.
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Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth. She's done the stuff he's merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party's corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol..
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Governor Palin has what the British Labour Party politician Denis Healy likes to call a "hinterland" - a life beyond politics. Whenever Senator Obama attempts anything non-political (such as bowling), he comes over like a visiting dignitary to a foreign country getting shanghaied into some impenetrable local folk ritual. Sarah Palin isn't just on the right side of the issues intellectually. She won't need the usual stage-managed "hunting" trip to reassure gun owners: she's lived the Second Amendment all her life. Likewise, on abortion, we're often told it's easy to be against it in principle but what if you were a woman facing a difficult birth or a handicapped child?
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I kinda like the whole naughty librarian vibe.