Only fanatics that overlook manic behavior as normal could have found Sarah Palin's resignation announcement to be just the ticket to her "higher calling." Is Palin so neurotic she really believes Americans would clamor for her to be president of the United States?
For all her mooseburger-eating, wolf-shooting, hockey-mom effort at cuteness, Palin obviously is a delusional, ready-made tabloid fixture whose rambling remarks to a handful of people in her Alaska backyard confirmed acute emotional and intellectual limitations. She erroneously attributed a quote to Gen. Douglas MacArthur—"Retreat, hell! We're just advancing in a different direction"—to explain her decision. Marine battlefield heroes Gen. Chesty Puller and Gen. O.P. Smith actually uttered it.
Whatever else pundits make of her resignation, the moment requires serious reflection about the chaos that would have been inflicted had John McCain become president and Palin his hyper backup in the White House.
The most calamitous economic crisis in U.S. history would have been in the hands of the aging, tempestuous, vindictive McCain, who prefers brawling over braininess, while the unrestrained and hyperventilating Vice President Palin would've been roiling the landscape with simple-minded economic babble straight from Wasilla.
If Palin indeed believes she's up to running the nation and she quit as Alaska's governor to beef up her intellectual bona fides in retirement for a 2012 run, she underestimates her impetuous weakness for the unconventional. She'd remain little more than as something of a comic "wack job," as she's now described by McCain advisers who dealt with her.
In his rigorous Vanity Fair magazine profile of Palin, author Todd Purdum reports that her associates in Alaska were so anxious about her behavior that they "consulted the definition of 'narcissistic personality disorder' in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—'a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy and behavior), need for admiration and lack of empathy'—and thought it fit her perfectly." Just like the crew of the fictional USS Caine diagnosing the psychotic Capt. Queeg.
She must've been convinced by enablers' whispering that she's an overnight political star destined for the top prize—the presidency—much like the teenager spotted by a talent scout in Schwab's Drug Store on Sunset Boulevard and cast as the leading lady in a 1930s black-and-white movie.
Not even the Republican Party's desperation will help Palin. She's washed up as a White House candidate.
That won't stop her and her base, of course, from continuing to believe.
But then McCain's other recruit, Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher, also believes he has a workable message of salvation for Americans.
