Ignorance, lack of curiosity and a fractious relationship with the truth.

The Financial Times is right on the money about Sarah Palin:

Her rambling statement offered no rationale for this strange decision. The lack of coherent organising logic behind her actions and words has given rise to suspicions that this move could be a gambit to head off fresh scandal. At this point, only one thing is clear; if this was a calculated first move in a run for the presidency in 2012, it was a stunningly bad one.

This latest stunt demonstrates a lack of basic political professionalism and skill, adding support to the notion, first disseminated by Republican officials during the 2008 campaign, that she is an unreliable diva. She will now enter the 2012 campaign season with little more experience that she had prior to the last one.

But the real tragedy for Republicans is not the hobbling of her 2012 campaign, and the potential end of her political career, but the fact that she had been one of the most popular presidential candidates among Republican activists.

She managed this despite not being presidential material; Ms Palin has demonstrated a disturbing comfort in her own ignorance, an unnerving lack of curiosity and a fractious relationship with the truth. And she enjoyed support despite not even being a political asset. The governor weighed upon the Republicans’ 2008 ticket.

TPM did a good roundup from Sunday

Ezra Klein chimes in:

I don't really understand why people take Palin serious as a presidential candidate. She was, after all, an unmitigated, even unique, catastrophe as a vice-presidential candidate. This is not normal, incidentally. For all the energy expended on vice-presidential picks, the overwhelming bulk of the data we have suggests that they just don't matter. They're interesting, but fundamentally unimportant.

But my friend Emily Thorson -- whose day job is as a political science graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania -- conducted some research suggesting that Sarah Palin was the exception to this usually ironclad rule. As with most good things in life, there are charts. Three of them, to be exact.

 

 

The first graph is simple enough: It's the poll standing of the two candidates. The dark vertical lines show moments when Sen. John McCain's numbers dropped precipitously.

Graph number two shows assessments of the economy. The voters were pessimistic and became more so as the campaign wore on. But the line doesn't correspond to McCain's falls.

The third graph shows the average favorability toward the presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Obama and Biden, you'll notice, seem virtually independent of each other. But McCain's drops are almost entirely predicted by Palin's much longer falls. It seems that every time Palin lost respect among voters, a certain portion of those voters turned against McCain, too.

Thorson, along with her co-author Richard Johnston, profess themselves baffled. There's no precedent for this. They conclude:

Judgment on her was incontestably important. The correspondence between dynamics in her ratings and dynamics in McCain vote intentions is astonishingly exact. Her marginal impact in vote-intention estimation models dwarfs that for any Vice-Presidential we are aware of, certainly for her predecessors in 2000 and 2004. And the range traversed by her favorability ratings is truly impressive. But why? We are unaware of any theory that opens the door to serious impact from the bottom half of the ticket.

I'd sort of like to see a graph of John McCain's approval ratings last week and next week. It wouldn't be at all shocking if Palin's decision to walk out in the middle of her gubernatorial term reminded voters of their anger at McCain for impulsively placing her so near to the presidency.

But either way, whatever Kristol thinks is going on here, there's really not a lot of evidence backing up the idea that she was a viable presidential prospect before this decision, much less after it.

and finally Josh Marshall with a rundown---She's done:

TPM Reader MC checks in ...

Am I living in Bizarro world? Does anyone really think that there is any realistic way Palin could be a candidate for President after resigning as governor? Yet pundit after pundit is saying this is a "risky" move that "may pay off". This is absolutely preposterous, and any professional putting such ideas into print should be relegated to writing copy for infomercials. All one needs to do is imagine the campaign ads (Can we Trust S.P. to Finish What She Starts?; Palin Quits When She's Tired, Winners Quit When They're Done; or just string together a few clips from the Mistake by the Lake) to realize there is no recovering from this. This is no wily strategic move; it's running from a scandal.

As I said earlier, I think there's a small chance there's no specific scandal and that Palin is just very mentally unstable. But MC is 100% correct that any pundit who thinks this is some risky but potentially brilliant strategic move is absolutely smoking crack. Hitting the crack pipe, or, just as likely, being witlessly contrarian to set themselves apart from the common herd of sane people. The kinds of ads MC mentions are right on the mark. But they're really only the beginning.

To a degree it goes without saying. But it's worth reviewing just how deeply preposterous Palin's argument yesterday really was when she claimed that she refused to exploit the people of Alaska by serving out her full term.

When you run for governor, as for president, you run for a four year term. You commit, at least implicitly, to serving four years, though many people end up not doing that for various reasons. There's nothing in the implied contract about running for reelection. Indeed it's arguable that the public would be better served by a governor focusing for four years on running the state rather than laying the groundwork for their reelection.

In any case, Gov. Palin, who's served only a little more than half her first term (remember, she was elected in 2006), announces she won't run for reelection. And having decided that she won't run for a second term, she concludes that it would be exploiting the people of Alaska to agree to serve out the remainder of the term they elected her to serve back in 2006. This is apparently because she'll be a lame duck. And, she claims, lame ducks never get anything done and just spend a lot of money going on taxpayer funded junkets. So better to walk away from her job and pass it off to the Lt. Governor who no one hired to do the job at all.

You could keep plumbing the depths of this ridiculousness for some time. But as MC rightly notes it's simply poisonous, toxic, fatal for anyone running for president. Setting side political and policy stances, the one thing really key about a president is that they be steady under pressure, not rash, and not prone to spur of the moment freak outs where they just walk away from the job to go to Disneyland. A lot of nonsense gets knocked around about 'character' in presidential elections. But this is the foundational question of character that really is critical. Assuming this isn't about some soon-to-pop scandal and it's really that Palin just decided on a moment's notice (look at how much preparation went into the press conference to know how long this was in the works) to up and walk away from her responsibilities, that's simply fatal for anyone's presidential chances.

She may resurface as a latter-day Hannity or she may found some Palin-specific Anti-Defamation League dedicated to calling out obscure bloggers who've written mean things about her. But what very little shot she had as a future presidential candidate (and it was a much longer shot than I think many realized) is over. She's done. She's back to what she was -- a small person looking for someone to be angry at.

Posted via web from Jim Nichols