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Some interesting reading this morning on the Sarah Palin phenomenon and the possibility of she becoming the Republican candidate in 2012.

Gail Collins: I am not part of the suicidally depressed left that is sure Sarah Palin is going to be the next presidential nominee.

I think she’s too smart to even try — she is very smart, in an uncurious, intellectually lazy way. Sort of what George Bush would be like if he’d been sent to Wasilla High instead of prep school. In fact, let’s give Sarah some credit here. If George W. had her background, he’d be serving fast food and cursing the day he got fired from the overnight shift at the canning factory.

David Brooks: “…let’s all stop paying attention to Sarah Palin for a little while. I understand why liberals want to talk about her. She allows them to feel intellectually superior to their opponents. And members of the conservative counterculture want to talk about her simply because she drives liberals insane. But she is a half-term former governor with a TV show. She is not going to be the leader of any party and doesn’t seem to be inclined in that direction.”

The Sarah Palin phenomenon is a media psychodrama and nothing more. It gives people on each side an excuse to vent about personality traits they despise, but it has nothing to do with government.

She is in 2010 what Jerry Falwell was from the mid-1990s until his death — a conservative cartoon inflated by media.

Andrew Sullivan thinks not…

I understand why David would rather she go away; but like his dismissal of the power of the Christianist right in American conservatism and culture, this dismissal of Palin misses, I think, several critical things.

The first is the psychological appeal of the beautiful female warrior. Palin is not appealing to the Republican super-ego (in so far as one has survived the last ten years); she is directly, umbilically connected to the Republican id (and some other male organs). Her appeal is visceral not rational. And if modern post-Nixon Republicanism has always had a thread of class resentment sustaining it, Palin concentrates it into a heady brew. If Nixon was cocaine for the resentful psyche, Palin is meth.

Secondly, she fuses both Tea-Party anti-government sentiment with neocon conviction about the necessity for American empire. Of course, none of this makes any sense, but Palin, unlike some of her rivals who feel some kind of lingering need to relate their policies to fiscal and global reality, is a thoroughly post-modern creature.

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Who else puts all this together for the GOP? No one. Huckabee is crippled by a record of spending and leniency. Romney is crippled by being Mitt Romney and Mormonism. Pawlenty: seriously? Santorum? Ditto. Brown? We are beginning to see the depth of his predicament. DeMint? Rubio? C’mon.

Yes, many tea-partiers do not think Palin is “qualified” to be president. But primaries are won by enthusiasm and star power. Palin has both. And she has money. And, most important, she has a media machine dedicated to promoting her outside of any real scrutiny or questions. She has never faced a real press conference and speaks to “pre-screened” questioners at debates and speeches. She is a test-case of how willfully divorced from reality a segment of America can remain, and how irrelevant reality is for today’s niche-targeted media. All of this makes Palin the most potent force in American politics since Obama.

Good stuff.  Every time I dismiss Palin’s chances of ever attaining the Presidency, I think back to Bush’s victories in 2000 and 2004.  With an electorate foolish enough to vote in an incompetent nit twice, anything is possible.

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