In a poll taken earlier this month, 55 percent of the people surveyed had an unfavorable opinion of Palin, and 71 percent said she was not qualified to be President. I don't know why the media still treats her every tweet as newsworthy, because as a national political figure, she's a joke.
And I'm not sure she wants to become President. She can continue to have a lucrative career on the lecture/pundit circuit, playing to that sliver of the population that does consider her to speak for Real True American Common-Sense Values. Why ruin such a good thing by seeking votes from more moderate voters or, heck, actually trying to run a country?
The disturbing thing is that some 30% of the electorate think she's so great she should run the country, 45% think she's pretty swell and some similar number didn't think she wasn't an automatic disqualification for the McCain campaign. More amazing is that these numbers are the numbers after the election, when she was revealed to be a dimwitted, incurious, manipulative, unethical and generally dishonest person of the highest caliber.
She's had the traditional upward trajectory of a shooting-star politician: local council, mayor, governor, and VP candidate (notice mostly executive positions, not legislative). At each stage she could have backed out and gone to the simple life of fishing and hunting while her husband ran snowmobile races or whatever in between trying to get Alaska to succeed from the Union. But she didn't, she kept stepping up and up and up, demonstrating a near limitless ambition. This is not the kind of thing one can indefinitely keep at bay with a few speaking gigs and some TV time on Fox.
She's not an ideals person (she can't even get through an interview without reading notes off of her hand), or somebody of a unifying or consistent internal vision, what she has is limitless ambition.
Considering that most people had never even heard of her before the election, and she still has this kind of following afterwards (despite these obvious shortcomings) would make me want to get her out on speaking engagements and doing favorable TV spots as much as possible for the next couple of years.
Mark my words, she will be a candidate for President in the next election cycle starting in a year or two.
Observe how her unfavorable ratings have been going almost monotonically upward since the election. The more people hear about Palin, the less they like her.
I hate to write a political comment, but looks like a slow day on HN.
Palin is like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, or Pat Robertson. She is famous and popular among a measurable slice of voters, so she speaks to/for those voters.
I strongly doubt she has a future as a presidential candidate. But as a political figure and news magnet? She's probably just getting started.
One of the interesting things about Palin is that the more she is trashed, the more she is loved by her supporters. So there's a feedback loop going on there. If you really don't like her the best thing to do is simply to stop talking about her.
Palin is not campaigning against the word. Rather, Rahm Emmanuel, the White House Chief of Staff (who, in general, has a reputation for cursing like a sailor), described certain political opponents as “retarded”, and Palin, whose son has Down’s Syndrome, criticized him for it. If you think Palin was purely motivated by compassion for the developmentally disabled and not at all by the fact that the person she lambasted hails from an opposing political party, then I have a bridge to sell you.
In fact, we happen to find Sarah Palin a bit of a comedian herself... And don't take her seriously.