For most liberals, the appeal of Sarah Palin is baffling, much in the same way the appeal of George W. Bush was baffling.  Both are governors with little accomplishment to speak of, and even less intellectual capacity, with odd public speaking styles that to most educated people seem hokey and contrived, and we don’t get why anyone would entrust public governance to these people.

And it is exactly this bafflement that gives us pause. After all, George W. Bush was able to parlay a lackluster career as Governor of Texas and a downright dismal career as a business executive into two terms as President of the United States.  His capacity to get elected and re-elected astonished us, and indeed the rest of the world.  Could Sarah Palin, whose mediocrity parallels Bush the Younger, be equally the electoral powerhouse? 

This is what liberals worried about as they watched Sarah Palin last week resign as Governor of Alaska, stating her desire to not run for re-election, and to not serve as a lame duck.  She alluded to bigger and better things for herself.  She threatened lawsuits against anyone predicting imminent indictment or other scandal a la Mark Sanford.  Is she really making a run for the Presidency in 2012?  And if she is, is this first move a brilliant strategy or a hare-brained scheme?  The talking heads on nearly every news station are speculating, of course, when they bother to take a break from reminiscing about Michael Jackson.

To be frank, it’s been hard for me to work up the urge to get into political commentary on policy matters.  But give me a good election horserace and I start salivating.  And since this seems to be the moment at which many believe the race for 2012 is on for the GOP, allow me to make my very first prediction:  Sarah Palin will not be the GOP nominee in 2012.

It’s understandable why Palin thinks she might be the nominee.  She was plucked from relative obscurity and thrust into the national spotlight and to her rather dim mind, she did quite well there.  She had crowds roaring for her, the PAC money rolled in, and there are still people with McCain-Palin bumper stickers on their cars, only they’ve removed the top “McCain” part, just leaving “Palin for President” behind.  The press can’t seem to resist her, even when they have nothing nice to say.  Even liberals must grudgingly agree that she seems to be the first new star to rise in the GOP with some actual honest-to-god charisma.  When you’re a small town girl from Wasilla hungry for the glory of your point-guard days on the local high school basketball team, the attention can get a little heady.  You can start to believe that you really are the next big thing.

And what is becoming clear about Sarah Palin is that she honestly does have the kind of ego that big time politicians need to succeed.  After all, it takes more than a little confidence to believe you can be the leader of the free world. Her unwillingness to be “handled” by John McCain’s campaign staff is now well documented, and her bleatings that somehow she gets subjected to “a different standard” than others indicates a well-developed persecution complex that keeps her blind to her failings. People laud her as being “genuine” – which is really saying that she honestly believes every word she says when she says it.  Presuming that no skeleton that would have necessitated her resignation appears from her closet, Palin can be taken at her word as far as why she’s leaving office.  But that doesn’t mean that what’s coming out of her mouth has any basis in reality.

The cold hard facts are that Palin has little to no chance of securing the GOP nomination, and resigning the Govenor’s Office really amounts to a bold move in a plan that is doomed to failure almost from the beginning.  Here’s four reasons why:

·         You Gotta Have a Job to Get a Job.  Recent political campaigns have demonstrated that politicians running for office when they have resigned their previous office don’t do so well.  Turns out that voters, like employers, like the idea of hiring someone for a job when they already have a job.  Most recent examples of no-longer-elected officials running for President have ended somewhat badly: John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Howard Dean, Fred Thompson, to name a few.

The reasons why are both obvious and not-so-obvious.  Although John Edwards is now radioactive politically for entirely different reasons, at the time that his campaign tanked his problem was in part that he’d been a one-term senator from North Carolina who’d gotten lucky and landed as the VP on a Presidential ticket four years earlier.  (Sound familiar?) Since then he’d been working at a think tank and lost his Senate seat.  While he still had lots of support and was a great campaigner, the fact is he was yesterday’s news, which hurt his ability to do the two things you need to do to succeed in a Presidential campaign – build ground organization and raise money.

Also, incumbents have an advantage over their non-office-holding rivals:  a pre-existing campaign war chest and the ability to use current political issues to add money to it.  This is going to be Sarah Palin’s biggest problem.  Elected officials can use campaign money collected in prior election cycles for future campaign needs.  Had Sarah Palin run for re-election in Alaska in 2010, she could have built a sizable war chest and fundraising infrastructure that would serve her well in 2012.  It’s hard to argue that people should give money to you for an election that is four years away.  Yet that is precisely what Palin must do now.

I do believe however, that this dynamic lies at the heart of why Palin made the choice she did.  Because the only thing worse than trying to run for President having resigned your last elected office some time ago, is trying to run for President having lost your last election in your home state.  Remember George Allen?  Widely touted as Presidential material for 2008, the Senator for Virginia lost to upstart Jim Webb in the now infamous “macaca moment.”  Palin’s popularity in Alaska has been on the wane since she hit the national stage.  She burned an awful lot of bridges with GOP party members in Alaska to make her reputation as a “reformer,” and her incessant spotlight seeking among the GOP glitterati on the national stage has wearied average Alaskan voters, who want a Governor who is going to put Alaska first, ahead of her own career.  It really isn’t clear that Palin would win if she ran again in Alaska.  Better she pull the plug on her career as Governor before the voters do it for her.

·         You Gotta Be a Baller.  Sure, Palin loves to trot out basketball analogies whenever she gets a chance.  She likes casting herself as “Sarah the Barracuda,” the scrappy point guard, floor general leading her team to victory on the basketball court.  And for political purposes, the analogy is not without relevance. A good candidate is a lot like a good point guard – they have to be quick on their feet, in command of the action on the court, and a respected enough presence among their teammates to set up the shots needed to win the game.  To put it bluntly, you got to be a “baller.”

Palin’s “game” in the court of GOP politics isn’t nearly as good as she thinks it is. Sure, she has the media fascinated with her.  And she has the “social conservative” crowd thinking she’s a superstar.  But as Howard Dean aptly proved in 2004, being a media darling and having a very committed following in one segment of the electorate is not enough to win a Presidential nomination.  What you need is the ability to command a team of savvy political operatives who can turn those kinds of assets into a winning campaign that has the ground organization and the fundraising capacity to carry you to the White House.

People who have followed my political writing know that I talk a lot about “ground game,” and that is no accident.  At the end of the day elections are won when you get more of your guys to show up and vote for your candidate than your opponent does.  Building a “get out the vote” operation is a science, and both parties have operatives who are masters at the game.  As a candidate, your ability to attract these operatives to your team and use them effectively is critical to winning.  

After Palin’s performance on the campaign trail in 2008, it’s unlikely that many of the GOP superstar campaign operatives are going to want to work with her in 2012.  She doesn’t listen to advice, has a tendency towards playing to the crowd she’s in front of instead of thinking about the bigger picture, and tends to believe her own hype.  To put it another way – even though she may be a scrappy point guard, no one wants to play for her because she’s an egotistical ball hog who thinks that she can make all the plays herself, without listening to her coaches or passing to her teammates. No one who’s really “got game” is going to want to be on her team.

·         You Gotta Keep it Fresh.  Remember four years ago, when George Bush had won re-election and it was clear that there would be two raging primary season battles come 2008?  Remember who the predicted “stars” were?  How many of them actually became contenders?  How many became the party nominee?  On the GOP side, everyone was sure that George Allen would be a contender for the GOP until he tanked in his Senate re-election.  Hillary was considered to have a hammerlock on the DNC nod as late as November of 2007, only to be usurped by Barack Obama.  McCain was always considered a contender, but few believed him to be a real frontrunner until well into the primary season.  Many of the individuals who get touted early on as potential candidates for President get sidetracked or waylaid along the road to the White House.

And no one can resist a fresh face, which often leaves the early-on contenders as also-rans.  Barack Obama benefitted significantly from this in 2008, as did George Bush in 2000.  McCain was old news in 2000, Bush was the rising star from Texas, a new and exciting  presence, especially since almost everyone was convinced that elder brother Jeb Bush from Florida would  be the next scion of the Bush family to run for the highest office.  Indeed, Palin herself has benefitted from this dynamic since her nomination as VP last year.  Other contenders for the White House like Tim Pawlenty and Bobby Jindal seem less shiny by comparison, even though they are considered relatively new to the political stage themselves.

But this is precisely Sarah Palin’s problem over the long haul.  By the time the 2012 campaign really begins in earnest, she will not be the “Sarah Palin” of the election cycle, but the “Tim Pawlenty.”  She’ll be the former Governor of Alaska who ran on the failed McCain ticket in 2008.  Old news.  While certainly she has a lot of charisma she can use to draw attention to herself, will she really be able to retain the interest once someone shinier, newer, who doesn’t have her obvious flaws arrives on the scene?  The fact that we don’t exactly know who that person is yet is of no import.  Neither Barack Obama, George Bush nor even Bill Clinton were on anyone’s radar screen at this point in the process during their first runs at the Presidency.  

Three years from now there will be a new face she’ll have to compete against, someone no one has even thought of yet. Palin is going to have to work very hard to keep herself relevant for the next four years, and she won’t have the benefit of holding an elected office to help her do it.  The fact that she resigned before her term expires also leaves her open to accusations of being a “quitter” – something that can be capitalized on by an upstart rival.  Given her other disadvantages, it’s more than likely that come the 2012 GOP Convention, Palin will be watching someone else walk away with the prize she so covets.

·         You Gotta Run the Right Play. Palin’s resignation is an interesting gamble to be sure.  Many of the GOP pundits are correct that it offers her best shot at making a run for 2012.  She is now free to attempt to cultivate the kind of organization that can win a Presidential election.  It is true that as Governor of Alaska she faces significant hurdles to building a ground game and wooing the financial heavy hitters.  But even assuming that all the previous reasons why Palin won’t win end up not holding water, there is still the matter of where in the GOP her appeal comes from.

Palin is the darling of social conservatives.  Indeed, that was why she was plucked from obscurity to begin with.  The McCain campaign had a serious lack of credibility with the “religious right” crowd who mistrusted his stance on abortion and who disliked the fact that he wasn’t historically a big fan of the evangelical movement.  Palin was seen as filling that void for the McCain camp and it was a role she took on with gusto.

There’s only one problem:  the “God, guns and gays” strategy doesn’t seem to be working for the GOP anymore.  It’s the reason that the GOP seems so much at sea these days, looking for a way to reinvent itself to the American people and make themselves contenders in the next election cycle.  It’s hard to get excited about wedge issues like prayer in schools when over nine percent of the country is out of work, and the healthcare crisis looms.  It’s hard to worry about having the right to protect your home with a gun when the home in question is in foreclosure.  And the fact is, gay marriage is now legal in several states and the institution of marriage seems just fine thankyouverymuch. The fearmongering of the religious right wing of the GOP seems petty and insipid now that there are actual, real problems to be afraid of, issues that demand a thoughtful solution as opposed to slogans.

Part of the reason Obama won so handily is the defection of middle of the road voters from the GOP fearmongering.  Turns out that contrary to what Karl Rove proclaimed, the country had not become more conservative.  The moderates weren’t really drinking the conservative kool-aid.  They were merely waiting for an alternative they could trust.  (Democrats would be wise not to forget this in their ebullience over their current legislative majority, by the way.)  It seems unlikely that the fearmongering tactics will win back those voters, particularly if they are packaged up in Sarah Palin, whose representation of that constituency was part of the reason voters defected from the GOP in the first place.

Of course, it is possible that Palin could surprise us.  She could get lucky and manage to avoid the very obvious problems that would plague her candidacy.  She could yet silence her critics with a series of brilliant strategic political plays that puts her squarely in the frontrunner position.  But it’s hard to see where such a thing would come from.  Palin herself has not demonstrated much beyond the raw chutzpah that’s gotten her this far, but which won’t be enough to take the White House.

Palin also hasn’t demonstrated that he has a “secret weapon” that might help her snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.  Unlike Bush, she does not have Karl Rove and ready access to the Bush family donor list.  Unlike Obama, she does not have David Axelrod or the benefit of running against an opponent who, though deft and formidable, made some critical errors in judgment that cost her the nomination. In the end, Palin’s marginally improved her chances for a 2012 run by her resignation last week, but when your chances to begin with are so small, it’s hardly anything to get worried about.

Don’t panic.  Palin’s not going anywhere. My prediction is you see her make a run at the Presidency in 2012.  My prediction is that she is out of the running before Super Tuesday.  She will then sign a deal to do political commentary and a talk show on Fox News Channel.  Just see if I’m not right…..

Or am I?  Only time will tell.....and at this point, there is nothing but time.