I've often thought that Palin's speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination in 2008 served as a sort of test of whether one likes or dislikes middle-class evangelical Christians. (White ones, I mean; black evangelicals are treated differently, though they are very much on the same page religiously.) If you basically like them, as I do, your first impulse was to like Palin. If not, your first impulse was, at a minimum, not to like her. And of course "not like" doesn't begin to do justice to the loathing she provoked in many, especially academic feminists, most famously the one who declared that Palin was not a woman. A lot of it seemed to be raw class and regional disdain ("She doesn't have a passport! She went to the University of Idaho!").
After that, of course, things took a bad turn, and even a great many people–again, like me–who were sympathetic to her decided that she wasn't really qualified for high office. The last nail that went into that coffin was her resignation as governor of Alaska. Whatever the reasons, it communicated "flake," and her apparent focus on self-promotion since then has only made things worse, e.g. the "reality" show. (Okay, for the sake of argument, let's say she really is driven mainly by patriotism etc.; if so, her strategy is counter-productive.)
Qualifications aside, she really doesn't seem temperamentally suited. Her recent semi-coherent remarks about Paul Revere are a case in point. Never mind the fact that she was apparently not entirely wrong; it's not at all clear what she intended to say. She surely knows that her enemies, who include much of the press, are going to slam her mercilessly for every misstep, and she ought to be able to handle it more gracefully. Instead of laughing it off as a brief lapse, she complained, humorlessly, that it was a "gotcha" question and that she was, too, right. You can blame the media all you want for treating her unfairly, and there's a great deal of truth in that: no Republican could have made some of Joe Biden's gaffes without being permanently tainted ("clean articulate black man" would have been career death for a Republican). But it's the way things are, and if you're going to put yourself in the public eye, you have to deal with it in a way that leaves you looking better than your opponents.
I doubt there is much chance she could win. But Daniel Foster at National Review Online offers an interesting speculation: that she might run as an independent. There will certainly be a lot of happy Democrats in the land if she does.
Light On Dark Water 
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