I have been quiet about Sarah Palin for a bit, not needing my comments count to soar into the stratosphere again, but I do want to give her a little bit of free advice. If you see her, pass this on, wouldja?
You clearly won the round with David Letterman, but you were sailing a little close to the wind. For anyone, playing the victim is always dangerous, and really being a victim (as you are) does not minimize that risk — it rather doubles it. This might seem counter-intuitive, but that’s how it works. Persecutors hate real victims more than anything, and the injustice of what they are doing only fuels their hatred. This issue of victimization came up in your resignation speech also, and so you have to be extraordinarily careful how you refer to the crazies. In one sense you are stepping out of the governor’s chair because of the attacks on you and your family, but you are doing so in a way that gives you a better shot at the nomination (if you really are, as it appears, being dumb like a fox), and this means that the attacks on you and your family will only escalate. They will escalate like nobody’s business. So you are stepping down because of the attacks, but you are clearly not stepping down to make the attacks go away. You can’t afford even a whiff of “I hope you’ll leave me alone, I’m a private citizen now.” You should rather say something like, “I really needed to be able to come down to the lower 48 a bit more frequently so that I could have a better view of Maureen Dowd whipping herself into a pie topping.”
Second, be aware that many conservatives are sympathetic to you because of your ability to set off this aforementioned derangement on the left, which is admittedly a shorter trip every day. At the same time, George W. had this same ability, and yet he was no conservative. He was a “big government conservative,” which when translated means a big government liberal with some common sense left. Now that Obama is spending us into a little Bernie-Madoff-style prosperity, it appears that Bush had a goodish bit of restraint left, at least comparatively. But we don’t need any more slow death conservatism, and we need to stop measuring how far right we are while tethered to the left’s drunken lurches toward the far left. They are not a reliable indicator. I say this because a number of conservatives around the country are hungry for a genuinely different direction, and they know by now that the reactions of the Pie Topping Left are not a reliable guide to what that direction is.
And, by the way, if you go in a genuinely new direction, you will have two mortal enemies, the Democrats and the Republicans respectively. The Democrats will be the nastier of the two, but the Republicans will be meaner in a sly way, and far more effective.
The chattering classes have all been saying that you need to bone up on some stuff, go back to school. And I think this would be a good idea, but not in the way they mean. You have to do this in a way that irritates them even more than they are irritated now. What they mean by their zeal to see you “further educated” is that they want you to enroll in their schools, read their books and columns, seek the applause of their poisonous claques, and so on. And then, when you have done what they told you to do, they will pronounce you a failure. Promising student, they will say, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. The more conservative of them will shake their heads sadly. She could have been another Reagan, but wasn’t up to it. Never mind that Reagan redivivus would have almost all of them spitting nails. They only like Reagan because he’s dead now, and they will like you fine when you’re dead. Ignore them. Ignore them blithely. Ignore them like you have never heard of the books they are recommending. With regard to their urgent pleas, you should have the placid countenence of a Buddhist monk reading a Far Side cartoon. Their sophisticated construct that they call a world doesn’t really exist. You can learn more about the way the world actually works — as I believe you already have — by talking to the guy who sells elephant ears at the Nebraska State Fair.
In the meantime, study what you want. Read the kind of books that they would declare an even greater manifestation of what your problem must be. They want you to travel, so you should go places they don’t want you to go. As providence would have it, you are this generation’s catnip for the power elites. It is a beautiful gift. Don’t waste it.