“Mrs. Palin now has, she reports, a team of Washington policy advisers who provide her with daily briefings on domestic and foreign affairs. None of them have, it appears, provided her with intelligence on the impact of certain of her central themes.

“On, for instance, the unsavory echoes of her regular references to ‘the real America’ as opposed to those shadowy ‘elites,’ now charged with threats to the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of all real Americans. Neither does she seem to have any idea of how that low soap-box oratory—embracing one kind of American as the real kind, those builders in the towns and cities across America—rings in the ear today. It is not new.

“So entrenched a place does this thinking occupy in Mrs. Palin’s bag of references that it can pop up anytime on any subject. Challenged in Mr. Wallace’s interview on alleged irregularities in her husband’s direct contacts with Alaska state officials—on judicial appointments, labor issues, and the like—Mrs. Palin countered that he was her ‘soul mate,’ her ‘best friend.’ The one she could trust while she was off traveling—and he busy working on ‘issues that meant a lot to him and to people, yes, out there in the real world with steel-toed boots and hard hats trying to build this country.’…

“Mrs. Palin regularly invokes the name of the most revered of her heroes, Ronald Reagan—among the sunniest stars ever to mount the political stage, and a leader who spoke to all of America. He did not appeal to the aggrieved. Nor did he see in the oratory of grievance, or talk of real Americans and those who were not, a political platform.”

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“Sarah Palin, who with 17 months remaining in her single term as Alaska’s governor quit the only serious office she has ever held, is obsessively discussed as a possible candidate in 2012. Why? She is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states.

“Conservatives, who rightly respect markets as generally reliable gauges of consumer preferences, should notice that the political market is speaking clearly: The more attention Palin receives, the fewer Americans consider her presidential timber. The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that 71 percent of Americans — including 52 percent of Republicans — think she is not qualified to be president…

“Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election. But today’s saturation journalism, mesmerized by presidential politics and ravenous for material, requires a steady stream of political novelties. In that role, Palin is united with the media in a relationship of mutual loathing. This is not her fault. But neither is it her validation.”