Staggering off the stage

Something else Sarah Palin can see from her house: The end of her 15 minutes. Since announcing that she would resign later this month as Alaska governor, a move that will keep her resume as trim as her figure, Palin has learned anew how rapidly political sheen can turn to dusk.

Queried by press types about her potential part in Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Robert F. McDonnell’s campaign plans, staff spokesman and political wiz kid Tucker Martin issued a one-sentence reply: “There are no announcements of any events with Governor Palin to date.” Translation: Uh, Sarah who? The candidate himself moderated slightly Tuesday, saying his staff has spoken with Palin’s and calling the governor “a good spokesman,” but declining to say he wants her campaigning for him.

That sentiment is paralleled in New Jersey, where Republican Chris Christie shockingly is polling ahead of Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine. “We don’t have any plans of pulling her in,” state party Chairman Jay Webber told The Associated Press. “We’re busy working to get Chris Christie elected ...” Filling the elliptical void: Sit tight, Sarah, and wait for us to call. In January. Wink.

One thing precisely keeps some conservatives clinging to Sarah’s skirts, and the thing is liberals despise her. Principally, they despise her because she came striding awkwardly onto the national stage from, of all places, Alaska, that expanse of nowhere cast off from the Lower 48, championing red values with enough hackneyed expressions and countenances to make a hillbilly – or even George W. Bush – blush.

Liberals regard Palin with contempt because they see her kind as contemptible. Her kind dwell in the realm of the ordinary, a place where watching stock cars zip around a paved oval for three hours on a Sunday afternoon is preferable to sipping merlot and waxing pretentious over Darfur and Dostoevsky. So leftists’ minions in Big Media descended on Wasilla last summer like it was Utah Beach while somewhere Joe Biden, in his perpetual stupor, muttered something about Indians owning 7-Eleven’s and FDR going on TV to allay fears over the recent stock market crash.

The offshoot was that the harder liberals flailed at Palin the tighter conservatives embraced her. The grip began to loosen July 3. When Palin announced her resignation in a disjointed 17-minute speech, lights began flicking on and doors began drifting shut. She assuredly will not be a presidential contender in 2012, and she ought never to have been.

Since Reagan, liberals’ method has relied largely on two strategies, one to depict foes as cruel, cunning and corrupt, driven by unbridled avarice running roughshod over the commoners, and the other, to depict foes as rubes, intellectually bereft bumpkins starved for philosophical texture and sophistication.

Conservatives need candidates with the intellectual stuff to articulate the thinking behind their ideology and to stand against those liberal stratagems and refute them. Reagan deflected the blows and delivered his own. Palin withered.

Far more than the man at the top of the Republican ticket last fall, Palin appeared to be a true believer in conservative principles. Even if she was this and remains it, a revival of the conservative movement requires the emergence of figures of intellectual heft along with a determination to weather storms. These would be tough, smart people. Palin, for all of her charm, has not demonstrated that she matches the description.

She ran from her post. And from her, onetime allies now have begun to flee. In this, the governor gets no less than she has given.