Run! Sarah! Run! Or Don't

By releasing a mock campaign video in Iowa a week or so ago, Sarah Palin has been able to revive speculation that she is planning on running for the Republican Presidential nomination. After having the Not-So-Divine Sarah's existence forced on me for over three years now, I am almost amused at how easily this not very bright but ruthlessly ambitious historical footnote can manipulate the media and the blogosphere and whatever the hell collections of dimwits follow her incessant doings.

Will she run? Won't she run? She will! She won't! She will, won't she?

Who cares?

My prediction is that she won't run, and I say this for a number of reasons. First, I don't think she wants a real job. I think that she enjoys being a celebrity more than she enjoys the power of position. As becomes increasingly apparent as former Palin apparatchiks spill the beans on what an uninvolved, bored, and distracted governor she was, it also becomes apparent to me that the last thing she'd want is a job that involves much longer days and much deeper attention. She didn't quit halfway through her term so that she could run or not run for President. She quit it because she was bored and because she had better opportunities in show business. And ever since, everything she has done, whether it has been some publicity stunt disguised as a campaign appearance or whether it has been some trumped up "controversy," has been, at base, designed to get people to pay attention to her. She is the loud and bratty problem child, who jumps and whoops and breaks lamps for no other reason than to get attention. Don't be fooled. She really is that pathetic.

But I think there is a second reason why she will not run. Although she is not particularly bright (or stupid, either; I would suggest that her intelligence runs somewhere along the lower end of average), she is cagey, and I think she understands that, should she run, her greatest enemies would not be Democrats, but her fellow Republicans.

Let's say that she was foolish enough to run. Were I one of her opponents, I would wait for the first opportunity in the first of the 6000 "debates" she'd have to attend to say, "Well, my feeling is always that once you take a responsibility on, it is important to see it through. I mean, it's nice to be famous and all, but when I was sworn in as (governor, congressman, senator, pizza chain chairman), I was determined to see my term through and not simply walk away from my responsibility to my (constituents/shareholders)." She would be a sitting duck, and I think that she knows it.

The trouble that she's developed with her brand (and my apologies for using that term) is that it is dependent on her being a possible candidate for the Presidency. She's just a gibberish-spouting cipher otherwise. So I expect that she will, at the latest date possible, announce that she will not run in 2012, but will leave the door open to a run in 2016. And then maybe she will announce her candidacy for a spot on an upcoming edition of Celebrity Apprentice or perhaps a revived Circus of the Stars.