She runs. She loses. She quits. It turns out that she then sits on the sofa watching telly in her pyjamas. Whatever she does, or doesn’t do, 11 months after failing to heave John McCain into the White House Sarah Palin still commands the rapt attention of people who love her, people who love to hate her and people who love a good story.
Nothing Levi Johnston has to say about her will change that. It is amusing, if true, that contrary to the Palin legend she does not fish, go to her son’s hockey games or care much for the daily grind of family life.
But her daughter’s former boyfriend is hardly an impartial source, even when writing and posing for Vanity Fair. So Palin’s disciples will ignore his latest revelations. Her critics will feast on them, however, and the media will hunt for more.
If Palin can take the heat, her star may actually rise. There are three simple reasons for this. The first is that she connected so blissfully with the Republican base way back at the party’s Minneapolis convention last year. She had a great script and a show-stealing nose wrinkle. The crowd ate her up, but so did the networks.
In the business of political brand-building there is nothing like a sustained early blizzard of publicity, and nothing delivers that like being the star of a presidential campaign. Second, the field is thin. No one in her party can match her for both name recognition and what Hollywood calls heat. Third, as a politician she is a lightweight and a liability, but also clever.
If one phrase enters the history books to illustrate the scare tactics used to derail US healthcare reform this summer it is likely to be “death panels”. Palin didn’t coin it, but she helped it go viral, via Facebook: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down's syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society', whether they are worthy of health care," she wrote last month. It was misleading, exploitative, manipulative and highly effective. No wonder they call her the Palinator.
Because her knowledge of the world is so thin and her knowledge of US politics so parochial, she may prove to have been equally smart to quit as Governor of Alaska. Out of office, she can do her reputation far less harm than in.
She can aim to leave no paper trail except the one created by prepared speeches, most of them likely to earn her six-figure fees. People who feel bruised by her may, like Levi Johnston, sally into print from time to time, but without hard evidence of criminal wrongdoing they will not sink her.
Only two things can do that: a national election, and her own limited ambition. The most telling line in Mr Johnston’s journalistic debut is one of the least sensational. After returning to Alaska from the presidential campaign trail, “Sarah was sad for a while,” he wrote. “She walked around the house pouting. I had assumed she was going to go back to her job as governor, but a week or two after she got back she started talking about how nice it would be to quit and write a book or do a show and make 'triple the money'.”
Anyone determined to prevent her running for office again should pay heed and offer her her own television show. In the meantime, “Palin-Cheney 2012” baseball hats and bumper stickers are available via the web.
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