In the absence of some sort of scandal about to come crashing down on her head, I simply don’t know what to make of Gov. Palin’s resignation. I can buy the argument-just-that if she is going to be campaigning intensively for national office, it’s in many ways a more honest thing to step down than to neglect the duties for which she is currently being paid by Alaska’s taxpayers. That makes her value-for-money, not a quitter.
However, if the reason she is resigning now is indeed a run in 2012, it looks wildly premature. Her base is already in the bag; she now needs to convince the skeptics that she could be an effective president – and the best way to do that would have been to make a good job of running Alaska, to shed the flakiness, and, dare I say it, to read up on a few things. She’s an intelligent person, and she’s an individual who has been treated to a degree of media vilification that goes well beyond any reasonable norm, but she has yet to demonstrate that she has what it takes for the White House. Doing the rounds of the rubber chicken echo chamber (there are no metaphors that I will not mix…) to the hosannas of the faithful is not the way to go.
As for whether yesterday’s news represents just the latest stage in a wider ‘crack-up’ of the religious right, Heather, I doubt it: Sarah Palin is Sarah Palin is Sarah Palin. Sure, she appears to be a somewhat religious woman, but, unlike, say, Mike Huckabee, I never detected a great deal of evidence that she had much interest in imposing those specific views (or their derivatives) on the population as a whole.
Finally, we should not be afraid of candidates with the populist touch. In the end, it’s what a candidate says that should count, not how he or she says it. If it takes a bit of aw shucks to defeat Obama-a clever populist in his own right-in 2012, so be it.