Marc Ambinder explains why a Sarah Palin comeback is going to be a lot harder than either she or her supporters believe:
The key to making a political comeback is to have somewhere to come back from — and somewhere to return to.
Sarah Palin can’t make a comeback because she didn’t go anywhere. Not up, not down. Not sideways. Aside from a brief and totally artificial post selection bounce last year, Palin remains a fixed political commodity.
To simplify, the entire political left thinks she’s a caricature of know-nothing knuckle-dragging conservatism. About half of the political right thinks she’s an anti-hero. The rest of the right is nervous about her effects on that first half.
For Palin to get to somewhere — for her to create a political narrative that changes people’s minds about her, she has to change something.
The answer, it would seem, is obvious:
[S]ince an overwhelming majority of Americans don’t believe she is qualified to be president, Palin could spend the better part of three years boning up on policy. Instead, she resigned the governorship, bizarrely so, and promised to work on Alaskan issues from the outside. To date, her contribution to the world of policy: “death panels.”
Palin, as the book “Sarah From Alaska” by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe shows, is very happy to be where she is. Her lack of depth, she thinks, is a creation of the liberal media. It’s well and good for her to think that, but it isn’t true.
Instead, Palin is content to update her Facebook page with well-written — ghost-written — formulaic conservative talking points. This isn’t a knock against conservative ideas — this is a knock against Palin’s incapacity to understand how limited she is by her refusal to engage with the world on its own terms.
Unless and until that happens, she’s going to continue being a gadfly.
H/T: The Pajama Pundit
