Republican Legacy Chain: Quayle….Dubya….Palin?

Soon-to-be-former Gov. Sarah Palin, quoting the Bible as she makes her ostensible exit, seems to have pulled off a neat trick: sticking to the script [the ultimate one, in this case] and, at the same time, departing from it [being unpredictable]. It’s highly likely that she doesn’t really appreciate the irony involved, but it doesn’t matter; what she has done is established that she will conduct the next phase of her political journey as a drama queen. This is the reverse of Nixon in ’62.

Obviously, the Republicans will need an electoral guinea pig in 2012. The choice Republicans face is whether an upcoming 2012 debacle will resemble Barry Goldwater’s 1964 loss to LBJ—which, for all intents and purposes, eventually became the starting locus for a four-decade conservative ascendancy—or, George McGovern’s 1972 trouncing at the hands of Richard Nixon, which did not do the same thing for the Democrats.

Neither the ’64 nor the ’72 scenario will deter Palin. This is likely because she’s self-delusive enough to think that she can win even with the current American political zeitgeist being what it is. However, she may vaguely senses that she has an opportunity to become a more salient historical figure, as opposed to the intellectually challenged cipher that sank John McCain.

There remain two other possible positive outcomes from Palin’s obvious early hat-toss, at least as far as conservatives are concerned. The first is that a debacle can be avoided if, like other chimerical early front-runners [see: Ted Kennedy in 1980, Gary Hart in 1987, Paul Tsongas/Jerry Brown in 1992, Howard Dean in 2004] she flames out soon enough for a more viable candidate to be presented, resulting in a more salient contest in 2012.

The second involves the aforementioned possibility of things getting so much worse than they are now [a cataclysmic economic collapse approaching 1930’s levels or a terror attack on American soil approaching the scale of 9/11] to the point that Obama’s administration is perceived to be even less competent than W.’s. If that happens, Palin might become the perfect candidate: any notion of conservative/Republican moderation will go right into the trashcan and we would be looking at an administration headed by a W.-Quayle hybrid.

And with Rush Limbaugh in the role of both Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.