Random thoughts on Palin

What happens to Sarah Palin after the GOP ticket goes down in flames? After further exposure to her since my first post after her selection, I suspect she will continue to be a force in national politics, but she won't be on the top of the ticket for a while without a serious policy makeover. She's the anti-Hillary -- the left despises her as deeply as the right despises the junior senator from New York. Palin will be most useful in her current role as attack dog/crack for the base, until she gets the opposite of a Clinton makeover. Since she's clearly heterosexual (unlike Hillary), she doesn't need softening so much as sculpting. Perhaps Kissinger will spend the next couple of years giving her an education.

I suspect that she's a lot brighter than she has let on in the national campaign, although she's almost certainly no intellectual. No self-respecting intellectual has the kind of self-discipline and cunning it would take to play dumb for this long. But a Machiavellian power player certainly would. And she's clearly very capable.

While she has tapped into a large reservoir of support, Palin is likely a dead end for conservatives unless she shifts on foreign policy. The National Greatness, Neoconservative foreign policy stuff is likely over with on the Right for a while (although not on the Left!) and the GOP's most productive topic of meditation while in the wilderness is probably a return to it's curmudgeonly roots -- less government, lower taxes, get the hell of my lawn kind of thing. Otherwise, the GOP will lose more and more conservatives. Even a President Obama won't be able to shove his opponents into their arms unless those arms are open.