"I can't fight for what's right when I'm shackled to the governor's seat."

Matthew Continetti has a long article on Gov. Palin in the current issue of the Weekly Standard:

The fierce reaction [to her resignation] surprised Palin. She is acutely aware of what the media and her opponents say about her. She heard some people say that the timing of her speech was odd. Not so. "Independence Day is so significant to me--it's sort of a way for me to illustrate that I want freedom for Alaskans to progress, and for me personally," she told me during a telephone interview on July 9. Others said the motivation for her resignation was not clear. "I'm like, 'Holy Jeez, I spoke for 20 minutes' " giving reasons, she said. Bloggers conjectured that a horrible scandal was looming over her. Nope. Palin says she even heard a rumor that she resigned because pornographic pictures of her were about to hit the Internet. This left her bemused. "Between which pregnancies did I get to pose for those?" she said sarcastically. The obstinacy of her enemies, the fact that they consistently attribute bad-faith to her and accuse her of double-speaking, continues to mystify her. Hearing all the innuendo, Palin said to herself, "Really? You can't just believe what I'm saying?"

One thing you quickly learn about Sarah Palin when you study her career is that she never, ever does things by the book. The lady knows how to make a splash. She specializes in surprise announcements. Her 2004 resignation from the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, her 2005 declaration that she was challenging incumbent Frank Murkowski for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, her March 2008 revelation that she was seven months pregnant with her fifth child, then her August 2008 addition to the GOP presidential ticket and the subsequent shocker that her 17-year-old daughter was pregnant: All galvanized public opinion and upset established patterns of doing business.

Palin likes gambles. Her career is filled with firsts. In 2006, Palin became the first woman governor in Alaska history (as well as the youngest). In 2008, she became the first woman to appear on a GOP presidential ballot. And on July 3, she probably became the first governor with a 54-percent approval rating to resign from office for reasons having nothing to do with scandal or appointment to another job.

Palin says she had been thinking about her decision for a while, and had talked to various people about it. In January, during her state of the state address to the Alaska legislature, she asked lawmakers to put the previous year's election behind them. "I asked them not to allow those distractions that were on the periphery to hamper the state's progress," Palin told me. But her plea went unheeded. "It became obvious in the last months especially that too many people weren't going to ignore those things on the periphery," she said. As the months passed, Palin arrived at the conclusion that she didn't want a second term as Alaska's governor. She had achieved what she had set out to do, so why bother with one more lame-duck legislative session in 2010? "I know that we've accomplished more in our two years in office than most governors could hope to accomplish in two terms," Palin said. "And that's because I hired the right people." For Palin to remain shuttling between Juneau, Anchorage, and Wasilla would waste both her and her constituents' time. And "I cannot waste time," she said. "I cannot waste resources."

[...]

Why is Palin leaving? At this writing, there is no reason to doubt her stated position: Her enemies' concerted efforts to tear her down have caused her family financial stress and distracted her from her duties as governor. Since she returned to Alaska in November 2008, she has been hemmed in. Ethics complaints, insults, invective, undue attention, and legal bills have been all-consuming. "I can't fight for what's right when I'm shackled to the governor's seat," Palin said. For the last seven months the governor's office has been a ward. A trap. She is breaking free.

[...]

Speculation about Sarah Palin's presidential ambitions is premature. She herself probably does not know her next move. There is a strong chance that the unpredictable Palin may decide against running for any office, ever. You never know. But since the presidency so captivates Americans, and since the most recent vice presidential nominee has as much of a claim on the next presidential nomination as anyone, "Palin for President" (Tippecanoe and Piper too!) stories will be around for years to come.

Did Palin's surprise resignation help her chances? The flippant answer is, "Check back in four years, bub." The serious answer is, "There's no strong consensus one way or the other." When Palin announced her resignation, the conventional wisdom immediately gelled behind the position that she could no longer win the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. Maybe. Slowly and haltingly, however, an alternative theory emerged that said the move might not damage Palin as much as the establishment believed it would.

The polling evidence seems to confirm this. So far, Palin's fans have viewed her decision not to seek reelection sympathetically. A Gallup poll released on July 8 recorded that 67 percent of Republicans wanted Palin to have a role as a national political figure. A Rasmussen poll from last week found that Mitt Romney, Palin, and Mike Huckabee are in a statistical tie for the nomination.

Palin has a devoted following. No Republican politician energizes GOP crowds as much as she does. When I saw her speak at the Vanderburgh County Right to Life dinner in Evansville, Indiana, in April, Palin was practically mobbed by well-wishers and autograph seekers. The conservative movement is rudderless, and social conservatives in particular would like a powerful spokesman for their cause. The social issues may not have played much of a role during Palin's governorship, but once she is free from office she can emphasize them as much as she likes.

One lesson from Barack Obama's candidacy is that a politician should seize his (or her) moment. Elite opinion, remember, thought that Barack Obama wasn't ready to run for president in 2008. He should sit back, the argument went. Gain seasoning. Master a few issues. Wait for his turn. But Obama understood that when you do that, you end up being Joe Biden. Obama understood that once the spotlight is on you, it's foolish to let it pass on to someone else. He ignored the naysayers. He launched his campaign. Now he lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Reagan's late campaign manager John Sears had a term to describe what voters look for in a presidential candidate. The term was "appropriateness." Sears meant that John Q. Public wants to support the guy that best fits his mental picture of what a president should be. Does Palin have such "appropriateness"? The verdict is mixed. Certainly there's a latent hunger for a viable female presidential candidate who isn't Hillary Clinton. Palin, moreover, looked authentic and commanding in her speech to the 2008 Republican National Convention. It is not an exaggeration to say that her address there was one of the most effective political communications ever. In the vice presidential debate, Palin went toe-to-toe with Biden, the paradigmatic Beltway insider, and gave as good as--if not better than--she got.

Throughout her career, Palin has seemed most "appropriate" at moments when she senses that the populace is diverging from the political class that rules over it. Palin exploits the split and wins office as the tribune of the people. That is what happened when she saw that Wasillans were tired of the nonideological, nonpartisan, unexciting mayoralty of John Stein; when she saw self-dealing among Republican insiders in Anchorage and Juneau; when she saw that Alaskans were tired of Frank Murkowski and the lobbyist culture he nursed and protected. That is what she and John McCain tried to do last year, when Americans had grown tired of George W. Bush and Republican misrule (things didn't work out the way they'd hoped). The next time Palin sees a gap separating the people and their government, she may try to jump in and fill it.

For now, though, Palin will focus on writing her book, on the midterm elections, and on giving speeches. One certainty is that neither she nor the people who love and hate her are going away. "It's not retreat," Palin said. "It's moving more aggressively than ever to fight for what's right." Today the Palinistas and Palinphobes are as much a part of the national scene as they have been part of Alaska's. Since her debut, Palin has sparked curiosity and revulsion, devotion and illwill, admiration and scorn in equal measure. For whatever reason, the press cannot take its unblinking eye off of her. To the media and her detractors, she is a force of nature. She cannot be ignored.

The obsession is sure to intensify. Be prepared. Hurricane Sarah is about to descend on the Lower 48.

Read the whole thing. Regular C4P readers will recognize the narrative. Continetti summarizes her fights this year with a recalcitrant legislature that criticized and blocked her every move.

Continetti does make one glaring mistake. He writes that the Arctic Cat ethics complaint was about a T-shirt. The frivolous complaint was about an Arctic Cat jacket, not a T-shirt. The governor is a hardy Alaskan, but even she wouldn't be outdoors in February in Alaska wearing only a T-shirt.