Writing in The New York Times today, Ross Douthat looks at Sarah Palin‘s weird resignation, mounts the germ of an idea, and rides like the wind:
Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. . . .Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. . . .All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class.
Nonsense. What Douthat is ignoring is that Palin was demonstrably 
unfit for the job she was seeking. Voters have lots of experience in sorting through presidential candidates. The long electoral cycle is often painful, often trivial, and ridiculously expensive. But it exposes the candidates to the public, and the ones who survive earn a legitimacy just by enduring the process.
But vice presidential candidates are not democratically chosen. They are anointed, and when the candidate picks one who turns out to be unqualified, the public and the commentariate are merciless. Ask Dan Quayle. Had Quayle remained in the Senate, he would be like Orrin Hatch and John Warner and a bunch of other long-serving senators–a beloved elder statesman, a bastion of conservative midwestern values much admired for his amiability and his scratch golf game. But George H.W. Bush sold him as a brand new star. And the American people saw that Quayle wasn’t, and jealous of its prerogative to pick its president, responded viciously and with contempt. Do you think anybody would have written a book called Mr. Stupid Goes to Washington about a midwestern senator? Never!
The same is true of Palin. Not quite a year ago, the public responded open-mindedly to the attractive but untested governor, but quickly turned on her when she stumbled. When you’re an unknown quantity being pulled out of the atmosphere and being pushed to occupy the second highest office in the land, you better play the game all-but-flawlessly. Palin showed herself to be a promising but very flawed and unready candidate, and the public, resentful at political insiders who had so little respect for their intelligence, have made her pay the price.
It isn’t pretty, but if we were nice about rejecting this nincompoops, they’d keep coming around.
I predict that Ms. Palin will relocate from Alaska to a more central locale, one that will allow to join Rupert Murdoch’s stable of miniskirted newscasters and commentators where she can provide the occasional up-the-skirt preview to keep the “Joe-six-packers” happy and make Ron, the producer of Playtime Video, envious. Fox will provide her with a secure forward firebase to launch her verbal attacks on the Obama Administration and other Democratic leaders. In between TV appearances, she’ll make the rounds on the breakfast, lunch and dinner fundraising circuit, padding the bank account and getting her face-time on all the other networks. That more than two-thirds of the Republican Party believe that she is a viable presidential candidate only proves my theory about how far right this country has moved and how the Republican Party today is run by the intellectual descendants of the John Birch Society.
And while Palin skewers the press for its treatment of her and her family, her husband Todd had no qualms about being profiled at feature-length in not one, but three men’s magazines—GQ, Esquire and Men’s Journal.
However, the biggest problem that we have with Sarah Palin isn’t her politics, but the current economic crisis, which continues to pile up huge numbers of layoffs each and every month. If the economy doesn’t show signs of job creation by the end of Obama’s third year in office, we may very well be looking at Palin sitting in the Oval Office and enduring yet another round of reactionary conservatism.