Sarah Palin is the gift that keeps on giving -- to both Democrats and Republican party leaders. Judging from many of the GOP's visceral attacks in response to the Alaska governor's rambling pre-Fourth of July resignation speech, she has become as toxic as the H141 virus.
No matter how many sweet tweets she chirps to her fan base, high-level Republican poobahs want nothing more to do with the former beauty queen and McCain's short-term sidekick. The nastiness has been intense and unrelenting, the kind usually reserved for Democrats like Pelosi and Reid. One top Republican strategist snarled, "She's a stone-cold loser in a general election." Another voiced that "she's a train wreck."
Palin is feeling the same kind of disproportionate response by her conservative kinfolk that Alaskan wolves experience when exposed to rifle-toting airborne craft -- a hunting policy she enthusiastically endorsed.
Is the GOP simply culling its own herd? Has it belatedly realized that Palin is hardly the alpha female that she and her rabid supporters claim she is?
The intense study of Palin and her mysterious intentions -- palinotology -- will remain a media cottage industry. Moving beyond tabloid fodder, she's a story that literally and figuratively has legs. Vanity Fair served her a mighty comeuppance. Not that she reads the magazine. Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal delivered the coup de grace.
But Palin is like a character in Lost whose personal narrative and story line defies reasoning and empirical evidence. She's part Smoke Monster, part Ben Linus whose peculiar fidelity to truth is always suspect.
There's an inherent fascination with what makes her tick. She's her own boss, that's for sure. But what works in Wasilla does not necessarily work in Washington.
Any Palin news item will continue to be hungrily devoured and scrutinized. By comparison, Iran's fraudulent election and protests already seem so yesterday. We can't wait to hear Levi Johnston's latest dish about his non-future mother-in-law. Palin news will be with us during the rest of the summer -- and beyond. Remember way back in August 2001 when the big news story was shark attacks. Now it's all about the "barracuda."
Yet it's foolish and premature to categorically dismiss Palin's future presidential prospects; her popularity and poll numbers among the Republican grassroots faithful are surprisingly high, not unlike those summer days in Fairbanks when the mercury pushes past 70.
She can easily resurrect a charm offensive amid handpicked media sympathizers. Her Joe Six-Pack constituency remains dazzled by her looks, cliched rhetoric, and red-meat populism. These voters look far beyond her tortured logic and half-baked utterances. She's the Red States' Red Queen, their very own Arctic Huey Long who now has more time to hang out in the Lower Forty-Eight.
Will no longer being governor hurt her future political credibility? Or is this Beltway navel-gazing that represents conventional opinion among the chattering class? Yet who really knows? What pundit can predict with any certainty these days where or how the political winds might blow. What happens when the national unemployment rate keeps edging upward to 10, 11, and maybe 15 percent by next year?
Who will then be made the scapegoats? Will Capitol Hill Democrats lose big time in the 2010 mid-term elections, which can then serve as a catalyst for a Palin presidential push in 2012? Will it be too late for another Obama reset if the economy continues tanking?
What's interesting, however, is that in the current, divisive, and polarizing political climate, it has taken the "polar princess" to unite Democrat and Republican leaders in a common dialogue. They might disagree on health care, climate change, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, and stimulus funding, but when it comes to Ms. Palin, there is widespread bipartisan agreement.
Ironic, she has become the bridge to somewhere.