Thank You, Rush Limbaugh

The job may require it. Getting elected does not.

Signs that say she will run are fairly strong:
A new Huckabee-free poll shows her two points behind the frontrunner Romney (if she’s out of the running, Romney’s lead widens).
The other GOP candidates are really weak.
The hardcore tea-drinking party base still loves her.
She can raise money.
She can draw a crowd.
She is releasing her self-serving movie/infomercial in Iowa.
She took a Middle East trip which she could use to burnish her flimsy foreign-policy credentials.
She is launching national bus tours starting Memorial Day weekend, bringing family members along, visiting primary states including New Hampshire.
She said she has the fire in the belly several times.
Her presidential potential is what drives her career, such as it is: if she walks away from the 2012 race after walking away from the Alaska job, she could be one step away from selling floor wax in infomercials.
It really doesn’t cost her anything except a year of effort.
If she gets in, and the race doesn’t turn out to her advantage, she can always quit.
Unlike the other candidates, she doesn’t need to win the White House, in order to get what she really wants – enough attention and cred to go back to her nonpolitical career.

Signs that suggest she will take a pass are not totally convincing:
Preparation. She is quietly building a bit of a network in Iowa, but she has made little effort to visit the early primary states, or make preparations there, or recruit donors or staffers. But that may not mean much: she has her own notion of launching a career without following the normal rules or touching all the bases, which has political professionals watching in bewilderment. Palin thinks rules are for other people.
Money: she would give up financial opportunities if she ran, but she could go right back to the money well after the race, assuming she lost, and make even more money.
Family: the protestations that she is worried about her family’s privacy sounds absurd in light of the way she has exploited her family already, to include taking them on the bus tours; at best she’ll play the privacy card if she needs a face-saving way to quit the race.
Moderates and independents don’t like her, a lot of Alaskans dislike her, and party regulars are concerned about her behavior and her electability, but does she care?
Fox doesn’t seem to think she’s running, but how many times has Fox gotten things wrong?
She is actually the youngest contender, so she can wait. It seems that we’ve been hearing her name since the Third Crusade, but she’s only 47. Obama is 49. Huntsman, Pawlenty, Santorum and Bachmann are in their fifties. Romney, Gingrich and Cain have few chances left because they’re in their sixties, and Ron Paul is in his seventies. But does she want to wait, and let her name fade from our memories?

All that said, as I mentioned, the normal rules don’t seem to apply to her, and if we’re trying to use the rules of logic to predict her behavior, we can easily become lost. As she marches through the summer, watch to see if she does things that only a genuine candidate would do, as opposed to someone trying to attract publicity or to participate in the election in some other capacity like fundraising. If she does run, she could damage the GOP cause by driving the GOP presidential field to the right, and by driving up Democratic donations.

http://xiangmenglantern.blogspot.com/2011/05/palin.html