In the never-ending edge-of-your-seat ennui that is Sarah Palin's future political career, there's some news from the Last Frontier.
There was recent speculation about whether Palin, the ex-half-Governor would consider running in 2014 for the U.S. Senate seat currently occupied by Democrat Mark Begich. She said she'd consider it, unless someone other than Joe Miller (the former Republican nominee who lost to Lisa Murkowski's write-in campaign) and snooze-worthy Lt. Governor Mead Treadwell stepped up to run. She wasn't particularly happy with either of them.
A few weeks have passed, and nobody else has thrown their hat in the ring.
Yet now, Palin has stepped away from her previous statement, and says she currently has no plans to run. Someone else can do it. There are "thousands of Alaskans with that servant's heart," she says, who can run for Senate instead of her.
But she's also not ruling anything out.
She's not closing the door.
So, feel free to believe she's still relevant in the political landscape. Really, she is.
Back in the day, an open door was God's message to Palin to just "plow through." Now, it's merely a secular option. The door is just there, ajar, and she's not plowing, but neither is she closing.
Here's where I picture God played by my mother. "In or out! Make up your mind, but I'm not paying to heat the outside!"
I've never completely discounted that Palin might run again for something. Those in the Lower 48, or who only paid attention to her only during or after her disastrous run for vice president in 2008, tend to think she's motivated solely by George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Not because they're her favorite founding fathers, but because they're green and flat and made of paper, and you can trade them for jet skis, and cool boots, and fancy houses and stuff.
But people forget what motivated the old Sarah -- the basketball player, the woman who towed her toddlers around in a red wagon knocking on doors to become Wasilla Mayor, the underdog who took on the establishment and summarily kicked its ass in the 2006 governor's race.
She likes competition. A lot.
But she also hates losing. Maybe even more than she loves winning.
So, it's possible that she's listening to someone who is telling her that even if she won the Republican primary (which she very well might), there's no way she's winning in the general election. It's also possible that she hasn't even been in Alaska enough during the past year to qualify for residency, preferring instead her new Arizona digs. Or perhaps she read the latest polling in her home state from Hays Research.
They've got her positive ratings -- which had hovered around an unfathomable 90 percent during her governorship -- to 35 percent now. That statistic should come with an audio accompaniment in the form of a low whistle, a dull thud, and a subsequent explosive boom.
Despite this negative rating of a whopping 55 percent, how would she do against Mark Begich, or as she calls him "Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch --" The "Funky Bunch" being Harry Reid, and President Obama.
She appeared on a recent interview with Greta Van Susteren, and said, "I think it's kind of hilarious though that Mark Begich seems to want to use my name as his fundraising tool so often with his far-left friends, because every time I speak about this issue, he'll fire off emails and fundraising pleas saying, 'Sarah Palin is talking about taking my job.' He's kind of in a panic there being threatened, I guess."
First, the Democratic Party and its candidates have been using Sarah Palin as a fundraising tool almost as much as the right has been using Barack Obama. So this "hilarious" fundraising method exists on both sides of the aisle, and has been employed for some time, if memory serves me correctly.
Second, to use the words "Mark Begich" as "far left" in the same sentence is the hilarious part. Begich has every progressive in Alaska clutching their skulls to keep the grey matter inside. Begich is maddeningly centrist, to the Democratic base, and is considered one of those annoying Blue Dogs on the national scene -- a pragmatist in a Red State full of fossil fuels.
Third, let's get back to the head-to-head matchup between that panicking "leftist" Mark Begich, and freedom lovin', liberty smoochin', gun totin' "Alaskan," Sarah Palin.
And the results are: (drum roll please)
Senator Mark Begich: 53.5 percent
Former half-term Governor Sarah Palin: 35.2 percent
Yes, far-left Marky Mark, the Democrat who voted for Obamacare and hates freedom, summarily hands the Wasilla Wonder her rear end in a statewide race.
Alaskans don't like a quitter. Or a blabbering national mouthpiece.
Palin's honeymoon in Alaska is over. And so is her political career in the state she still claims as her own, and touts as a bedrock state for conservative values.
So, she lobs a grenade at the Democrat she can't beat -- the political equivalent of a middle-schooler blowing a raspberry, and Alaskans invite her to walk through another kind of door, and not to let it hit her in the backside on the way out.