Will America ever 'go rogue' -- again?

The good news is that 7 out of 10 Americans don't believe that Sarah Palin is qualified to be president of the United States; the bad news is that 3 out of 10 do, which only confirms my long-held theory that we can always expect about one-third of the American electorate to believe absolutely anything, support absolutely any cause, agitate for absolutely any lunatic.

Among Republicans, says the recent CNN poll from which the above figures are extracted, the imbalance in favor of lucidity is less pronounced, of course: a slight majority says yes, Ms. Palin is indeed qualified to hover over the nuclear button. After all, she's a mom, and as she argues in this week's newly released blockbuster of personal memoir and political philosophy, Going Rogue, "there’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood."

As the NY Times pointed out in a sneak preview this weekend, Going Rogue also contains tortured sentences like this one, in the very "first paragraph of the book": "I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier."

William Shatner is that passage's only hope; perhaps he can also make sense of motherhood as an Oval Office training ground.

But on to aspects of Ms. Palin's career more broadly worrisome than her syntax and maternal presumptuousness.

The Times, citing its eponymous magazine from the year before, noted that neither John McCain's top strategist or campaign manager saw Palin's "lack of familiarity with major national or international issues as a serious liability" to their ticket. And that "underscore[s]," continued the Times rather nervously, "just how alarmingly expertise is discounted -- or equated with elitism -- in our increasingly democratized era" (my emphasis).

It seems counterintuitive, but as you may recall from your high school history class, what the Founding Fathers feared most about a representative democracy was, well, representative democracy. The latter, with ballots in Everyman's hand, wasn't much better than an ignorant mob, and when confronted by demagogues and dunces who asked to represent them, "the people" could be a spectacularly gullible bunch.

Indeed, the Founders did everything they could, within the tasteful boundaries of the revolutionarily possible, to sever the "representative" from "democracy" -- by and large they encouraged class-based (and thereby education-based) property restrictions on voting and a hierarchical system of what historians now call "deferential politics," and they removed, as best they could, the direct election of presidents and senators from the people's hands. That way, they figured, perhaps not too much damage would be done by the directly representative "People's House."

In general, yes, they feared ignorance and popular gullibility; but specifically, they feared Palins and Palinites.

And should we presently scoff at the Founders' fears -- should we, that is, take comfort in CNN polls that presumably demonstrate the people's majoritarian resistance to profound imbecility -- remember, if you've the stomach, who just occupied the White House for two terms.

I wish I could say with exacting sincerity that I believe Barack Obama's election represented a permanent shift away from electoral frivolity. But ever since the Age of Reagan and the confirming elections of 2000 and 2004, I've come to internalize the frightening verity of that old line: Anyone can grow up to be president.

It is not, of course, the early and equal opportunity implied in that ultimately proven axiom that frightens; it's the post-growing part, the fact that any adult, no matter how conspicuously unthoughtful if not clueless, can become president of the United States.

I laughed in 1980, when Reagan was nominated. I again laughed in 2000 and to some extent chuckled in 2004. I won't laugh or chuckle again.

It should also be kept in mind that had the evidence of George W. Bush's gross mismanagement not staggeringly presented itself in September 2008, the staggeringly hapless Sarah Palin might very well have become vice president of the United States -- one little heartbeat away from Reagan-Bush status.

This is not to say that today I see any path for Palin's ascendancy. I don't. I doubt even she does. It is to say, however, that the modern GOP has always known it can always count on the exotically transcendent irresponsibility of the American electorate to save its sorry butt.

Never stop being afraid; because in the last 30 to 40 years, we've gotten weirder and weirder.