The "Hockey Mom" Governor of Alaska's decision to quit office has raised more questions than it answers.
Sarah Palin's decision earlier this month to resign as Governor of the US state of Alaska remains a mystery.
Is the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008 setting the scene for a tilt at the White House in 2012?
Or is the 45-year-old mother of five bowing out of politics altogether, devoting her life to family, some book writing and even hosting her own reality television show?
Who knows? But two things seem clear: Palin's premature resignation shows she is not ready for the more demanding rigours and scrutiny as president. Nor does her decision to quit politics reflect the conventional path to the White House.
First, some history. Since at least World War II, all but three presidents have hailed directly from elected office, and those who did not had far more impressive CVs than the two-and-a-half year Alaska governor.
Ronald Reagan was a successful two-term governor of California (1966-74) who spent the next six years as the patron saint of conservatives before his 1980 landslide election. Richard Nixon was a congressman, senator, two-term vice-president who became a Republican Party elder statesman for eight years in the political wilderness before his 1968 triumph. And Dwight Eisenhower was a 5-star US general who rescued Western Europe from Nazism before winning the White House in 1952.
Palin's record -- small-town mayor, governor of a remote and lowly populated state, failed campaign for vice-president, quit job with nearly 18 months remaining in her first term as governor -- is hardly in the same league as all of the above.
But if she runs for the White House in 2012, her decision to quit politics will merely reinforce doubts about her ability to handle what the Americans call prime time.
In last year's election campaign, the firebrand failed numerous economic and foreign policy tests, and her responses to several all-important issues sounded more like mealy-mouthed spin than sound judgment.
Charismatic and impressive though she was at first glance, as the campaign gathered steam more and more voters became uneasy about the prospect of Palin being a heartbeat away from the presidency -- a concern that took on extra meaning when John McCain would have been the oldest man ever elected to the White House. True, her anti-abortion, pro-gun and anti-tax views, together with her folksy, gut-level appeal to lower middle-class Americans ("Reagan Democrats", or in Australian parlance "Howard Battlers"), provided ideological red meat for the Republican Party's social conservative base that had grave misgivings about her running mate.
It is also true none of her weaknesses as a candidate has justified the Left's irrational hatred of the glamorous governor.
It is bizarre, indeed disturbing, how Palin -- a working mum who was only the second female vice-presidential candidate in US history -- has driven feminists and so-called progressives into fits of condescension and contempt. Still, Palin's decision to resign has reiterated widespread concerns about her policy depth and personal judgment.
The consensus among even Republicans now is that she is unfit for office. So much so that the leading conservative columnist David Brooks has argued the anti-intellectual populist is "a fatal cancer to the Republican party" because her inclination "is not only to scorn (left) liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely".
With Sarah Palin not up to the task and seemingly out of contention for the Republican presidential nomination, the onus is now on other conservative politicians to do the hard policy work and sound philosophical thinking to present a credible alternative to Barack Obama in 2012. The signs are not looking good.
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