Palin opens the door wider for moderates

Among Todd Purdum's nearly 10,000-word portrait of human instability on Alaskan ice -- an instant Vanity Fair classic, aptly titled in the 1950s strain of a sci-fi B-movie, "It Came from Wasilla" -- two brief passages seemed to encompass it all:

More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin's extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of "narcissistic personality disorder" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-"a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy"-and thought it fit her perfectly....

She has the good fortune to have traction within a political party that is bereft of strong leadership, and whose rank and file often demands qualities other than knowledge, experience, and an understanding that facts are, as John Adams said, stubborn things.

Notwithstanding the remarkable similarities between that personality profile and George W. Bush's -- the megalomania, the empathetic void, the default-celebrity status, the anti-intellectual harmony with a befuddled base, the resistance to facts -- it would seem Sarah Palin's political career, unlike George's, will end at the post-gubernatorial stage.

That was, obviously, hardly the intent. Her bizarre, '62like Nixonian declaration of ostensible retreat last Friday was also meant as only a slightly mysterious, transitional signal from Sitzkrieg to Blitzkrieg. She had had it with her geographical remove, encroaching state scandals and mounting legal bills, but of more vividly intended import was that the world awaits her philosophical élan, via HarperCollins, to be scattered like snowflakes throughout the lower 48 -- early primary states, especially.

True to Republican form, for Ms. Palin, the routine business of governance was but an inconvenience, an impediment to greater power.

But her announcement could not have been more ill timed. Her party's loosely outlined leadership was already staggering under the disorienting weight of serial recklessness and eccentricity, and then she ups and quits, out of the blue, reinforcing the party's image -- particularly that of its harder right -- of wholesale whimsy and carelessness.

John Weaver, a former McCain strategist, stingingly assessed Palin's surprise: "[Friday's] move falls further into the weirdness category; people don't like a quitter," (Weaver, by the way, is quickly becoming the quotable-quote go-to guy among GOP strategists. On the heels of the Mark Sanford scandal, he said of the Republican Party's self-eliminating ranks of presidential contenders for 2012: "At this rate, if you're a junior Jaycees president in Memphis, you could be in line for the nomination.")

Yet Palin's praetorians are a sturdy lot. It will take much more than her demonstrable flakiness, professional indifference and proven unpreparedness to dissuade them. William Kristol, of The Weekly Standard, for instance, first conceded the undeniable before relaunching his tireless defense: "Everybody I've talked to thinks it's a little crazy. But maybe not. What is she going to accomplish in the next year as governor?... But if she writes this book and gives speeches and travels the country and educates herself on some issues, that's good."

Mary Matalin, unleashing her finest Baghdad Bob efforts, actually called Palin's abrupt resignation "brilliant" -- "jok[ing]," as the Times' Caucus pursued it, "that despite her own initial inside-the-Beltway reaction of surprise, shoppers at her local Wal-Mart in the Shenandoah would be whooping 'hoo-rahs' because of Ms. Palin's continued popularity among conservative voters" -- and Michael Steele was positively giddy over Palin's sudden availability to beguile those WalMart-shopping voters in upcoming "critical campaigns in Virginia and New Jersey."

Matalin's equally abrupt analysis disregarded, however, two darkening realities for Palin as she looks down the primary roads to 2012: she'll be splitting her base with Mike Huckabee, and both will soon run into the momentum-stopping, libertarian-leaning wall of New Hampshire (and others beyond).

So what, if anything, does it all mean in terms of the bigger picture for 2012? Can we gauge anything at all?

Who knows, but here's my take: Keep an eye on Tim Pawlenty.

He's virtually undetectable in present polling of presidential preference among Republican voters, but he's also sharp, presentable, nimble, untainted, articulate, blissfully free after 2010, non-Morman, beautifully positioned for socially conservative appeal and, above all, temperamentally libertarian, which is the fresher direction the party is headed. With merely a respectable showing in Iowa, he can walk away with New Hampshire, survive South Carolina, then move on to dominate the larger Super Tuesday states.

And semi-frontrunner Sarah Palin (who shared the lead with Huckabee and Mitt Romney in CNN's latest polling) just made that all the more possible, because, to return to Todd Purdum's pre-resignation profile: "[T]he conventional wisdom among Palin's supporters in the Republican establishment was that she should go home, keep her head down, show that she could govern effectively, and quietly educate herself about foreign and domestic policy with the help of a cadre of experienced advisers. She has done none of this" -- which otherwise might have expanded her appeal beyond the socially conservative base.

Instead, she pretty much closed the door on her own presidential-nomination prospects, thus opening it wider for a moderate -- which is a much greater threat to Barack Obama.