Underestimating Palin

University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato reveals a keen political truism when he observes: "Sarah Palin can’t be underestimated."

I'm sure Prof. Sabato meant to conceptually convey that Sarah Palin should not be underestimated, for indeed with her there exists no behavior at which low point one can authoritatively say: Yep, that's it, she's hit absolute bottom.

It just can't be done. One can underestimate her performance with wild and elaborate abandon and yet she'll beat one's lowest expectations every time. In that she resembles Glenn Beck, or Robert Mugabe.  

Yet now come flurries of anticipation, if not exactly expectations, however low, about a Palin presidential run after all. What a stunner that Palin's political stirrings just happen to coincide with the release of a former staffer's expose -- Blind Allegiance -- portraying the Harpy Queen as warm as a viper, as devout as Jimmy Swaggart, and nearly as functionally stupid as Sen. James Inhofe (politics' gold standard of stupidity, never to be out-valued). 

Once the book is no longer a political sensation and literary cause celebre, Palin's stirrings will subside. In this prediction I hope, I pray, I beg every god of political fortune that I'm wrong. The Republican Party needs Sarah Palin. It needs her as its presidential nominee in 2012 and there's not a minute to spare or a legitimate doubt to raise. With Palin at the helm, defining all things GOP, the party would go up in a phantasmagoric fireball of electoral devastation it would never forget -- and never revisit.

So I'll pray for the GOP's guidance under Presidential Nominee Palin, but such a prayer request I doubt even God can grant; He's too busy trying to underestimate her, right along with the rest of us.

Comments

[Robert Lipscomb]

PM, I am a faithfil follower of you site because of your intelligence, logic and sanity. Maybe that is putting you at a disadvantage here. Everything you wrote makes perfect logical sense. But the GOP is having a nervous breakdown.

Seriously, what would people have said if my predictions for 2011 included that the GOPs in the House and Senate would almost unanimously vote to kill Medicare so they could give more tax breaks to the rich. I am sure it would not have been very flattering, but here we are.

I am not predicting a Palin nomination, but I can no longer dismiss it out of hand. I keep thinking of the Jeffersonians in the lead up to the War of 1812.

FUBAR

[Bobfr]

Concur with Robert Lipscomb.

Palin declare and primary - that's a prediction I'm willing to give a very high probability.

A Palin, Bachmann ticket - likely, with the open question being who's at the top.

All the two of them need to do is declare and Romney will be swept away.

Jon Huntsman would never be foolish enough to denigrate himself by even participating.

Ron Paul, Herman Cain, et al., - Palin and Bachmann would treat them like the chum they are, a snack.

For the sake of a genuine, conservative opposition party to emerge in the decade ahead, I hope much if not all of the above, happens.

[Elisabeth]

I'm not convinced Palin runs despite the movie opening in Iowa and the "bus" tour cranking up and the rehiring of some strategists.

Is she milking the fools or is she setting herself up as some sort of "kingmaker" or is she running? With Palin you never know. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised one way or the other.

[Carol]

Where else can a carnival sideshow make so much money but America? It's the ultimate fraud. Sarah will never run, but she'll take her narcissistic talent show on the road just as long as she sees money to be made from her adoring marks. She can't sing, the reality show stumbled, her last book tour didn't measure up to the first. The attention withdrawal must be awful, hence the fix only a faux campaign can provide.