Why all the cold-sweat suspense about Sarah Palin's future? The road ahead is obvious.
First, forget high public office. Serious practitioners of politics don't believe she'll be nominated as a presidential candidate, even by a Republican Party in desperate need. Palin's newly acquired champagne tastes surely rule out anything less than the top office.
So, ahead lies a life as the perennial novelty act, touring the country for yet more moments in the limelight and collecting handsome fees along the way.
The groundwork is in place. She spent months before and after the 2008 election creating the persona of a winking, slightly fey cut-up hockey mom, a parodied "Saturday Night Live" airhead claiming foreign policy know-how because she could see Russia from her Alaska front porch.
Rounding out the composite of a scatterbrain was her failure during TV interviews to name any newspapers she reads, unable to cite important U.S. Supreme Court decisions (including one involving the oil spill at Valdez, Alaska) and a penchant for ditzy school girl phrases straight out of old Andy Hardy movies, like "You betcha!" Either out of boredom or pique, she now also is known as a quitter.
Palin doesn't do heavy lifting. Deep thinking isn't her stuff. Simple slogans about "smaller government," "socialism," "energy independence," "I'm a fighter" and slamming media and liberals are enough to light up her easily titillated followers.
Before her shooting-star fame burns out, Palin will grab a book contract worth millions, sign on for radio and TV talk shows or guesting with big fees, do a few bit movie parts playing herself, join in more Saturday Night Live spoofs and eventually go the way of Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush's Palin equivalent.
Palin's eventual flameout was preordained by the foundering McCain campaign when it recruited the obscure former small-town Alaska mayor and governor for the desperate Hail Mary stunt to rescue McCain. Unprepared for the sudden stage-center life, her tissue-thin credentials and weakness for silliness were unmasked.
With an impulse for pop-off statements and Twittering she considers cute, Palin henceforth can only harden the evidence that she's a genuine lightweight.
Turning herself into a celebrity money machine is no disgrace, however. Failed politicians everywhere will wish they had the Palin touch for frothiness so they, too, could pack in mega millions without much gray-matter effort.
Americans need not fear that Palin will be their new leader. They can, however, count on her fooling gullible groupies who don't realize that her pretense to be presidential timber is part of her shtick.
