I’m sure you are probably ready with the easy answer: Nothing has changed. She has been giving half-cocked, barely coherent speeches for years, and this year, just a few days removed from the grand oratorical opus she delivered at the 2015 Iowa Freedom Summit, she’s still offering up the same rambling diatribes — with or without a teleprompter, it makes little difference — consisting of a strange mix of middle-America colloquialisms and a tinge of bitterness that comes from losing badly in 2008 and being relegated to the hinterlands of reality television ever since.
But Matt Lewis with The Daily Beast has touched on something that I don’t think most people have pointed out, at least not recently. After 2008, Palin actually had a chance to dust herself off and hit the reset button on her political career. He lays out the scenario thusly:
In fairness, Palin was once a reform-minded governor who enjoyed an 88 percent approval rating. But something happened on the way to Des Moines. I suspect the most vicious attacks (especially the “Trig Truther” stuff) radicalized her and embittered her, but I also suspect she also took the easy way out. Instead of going back to Alaska after the 2008 defeat, boning up on the issues, continuing her work as governor, and forging a national political comeback, she cashed in with reality-TV shows and paid speaking gigs.
This isn’t an original or new observation, In fact, back in July 2009, I wrote: “The tragedy of Sarah Palin’s recent press conference announcing her resignation as governor of Alaska flows from the sense that so much potential has been wasted.”
The trouble with taking the easy way out is that it doesn’t last forever. The people who truly last in this business don’t rely on shortcuts or good looks or gimmicks; they survive on work ethic, wit, and intellect. (That’s why, no matter how grandiose he gets, Newt Gingrich will always have a gig. Newt will always be interesting, because he will always have something to say—something to contribute.)
This is why — and it seems many conservative writers are now ready to concede this point — that Palin never really had any staying power or substance in the first place, without laboriously going back to Alaska to study up, and when she is left to her devices, especially without the teleprompter, this is what we get in raw form, which is a shell of someone like Gingrich or John McCain, who are, however much I might disagree with them on specific points, at least capable of manufacturing interesting ideas independent of anyone else.