Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow

I'm not sure what it says about any of us when it takes a story as big as Sarah Palin's jaw-dropping decision to step down as Alaska's governor to make a dent in the wall-to-wall coverage of a dead, child molesting freak, but that's what happened over this Independence Day weekend.

Opinions on Palin's move are all over the map, and that's not even counting the Left's flurry of nyah-nyah Nelson Muntz-isms. The establishment view appears to be that Palin has blown any chance of running for president in 2012, and hung a big sign reading "FLAKE" around her neck for the years after that (see Fred Barnes and Steve Green). Then there's the "she's going Perot" faction, summed up here by the Blogfaddah, that believes Palin plans to start a third party (I find this one hard to swallow myself). A close cousin of the Perot Theory, the "she's going Goldwater" group, led notably by Bill Quick, believes Palin is cutting herself loose from the constraints of governing Alaska as well as the Washington Republican establishment to wage a guerrilla war within the GOP over the next three years.

And then there's the "Who Needs This?" theory. Since joining McCain's ticket late last August, Palin's family has been subjected to the most vicious media assault imaginable, and Palin has also had to defend herself against a steady stream of specious ethics charges in Alaska. She's been vindicated 15 out of 15 times in those cases, but defending yourself against partisan lawfare is not cheap, and the Palins are not even remotely rich. One wonders how interested many (heck, any) of Palin's leftie critics would be in living in that kind of crucible for years at a time.

I don't pretend to know what Palin plans to do next, but if I were wagering, I'd bet heavily on "who needs this," with a hedge on the "GOP guerrilla warfare" theory, which would involve Palin spending most of the next three years in the Lower 48 campaigning for conservative candidates and building support in the heartland. The latter is probably her only option for remaining viable as a national candidate. The former is the only way her family is ever going to have anything like a normal life over the next decade.