University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato reveals a keen political truism when he observes: "Sarah Palin can’t be underestimated."
I'm sure Prof. Sabato meant to conceptually convey that Sarah Palin should not be underestimated, for indeed with her there exists no behavior at which low point one can authoritatively say: Yep, that's it, she's hit absolute bottom.
It just can't be done. One can underestimate her performance with wild and elaborate abandon and yet she'll beat one's lowest expectations every time. In that she resembles Glenn Beck, or Robert Mugabe.
Yet now come flurries of anticipation, if not exactly expectations, however low, about a Palin presidential run after all. What a stunner that Palin's political stirrings just happen to coincide with the release of a former staffer's expose -- Blind Allegiance -- portraying the Harpy Queen as warm as a viper, as devout as Jimmy Swaggart, and nearly as functionally stupid as Sen. James Inhofe (politics' gold standard of stupidity, never to be out-valued).
Once the book is no longer a political sensation and literary cause celebre, Palin's stirrings will subside. In this prediction I hope, I pray, I beg every god of political fortune that I'm wrong. The Republican Party needs Sarah Palin. It needs her as its presidential nominee in 2012 and there's not a minute to spare or a legitimate doubt to raise. With Palin at the helm, defining all things GOP, the party would go up in a phantasmagoric fireball of electoral devastation it would never forget -- and never revisit.
So I'll pray for the GOP's guidance under Presidential Nominee Palin, but such a prayer request I doubt even God can grant; He's too busy trying to underestimate her, right along with the rest of us.