Sarah Palin at her home in Wasilla, Alaska.
(2 of 6)
In Alaska, though, her answer could mean exactly what it says--that she doesn't yet know what she'll be doing in 2012. Here, you make each day from the materials at hand. "My intention" in the coming months, she said in her resignation speech, "is to go out and to campaign for people who can effect change all across our nation." She added that "I can't do that from the governor's desk" because enemies stirred up by her sudden prominence--and orchestrated, she believes, by the Obama White House--would bury her in unfounded ethics complaints.
Whether that is true or not, Palin's unconventional step speaks to an ingrained frontier skepticism of authority--even one's own. Given the plunging credibility of institutions and élites, that's a mood that fits the Palin brand. Résumés ain't what they used to be; they count only with people who trust credentials--a dwindling breed. The mathematics Ph.D.s who dreamed up economy-killing derivatives have pretty impressive résumés. The leaders of congressional committees and executive agencies have decades of experience--at wallowing in red ink, mismanaging economic bubbles and botching covert intelligence.
If ever there has been a time to gamble on a flimsy résumé, ever a time for the ultimate outsider, this might be it. "We have so little trust in the character of the people we elected that most of us wouldn't invite them into our homes for dinner, let alone leave our children alone in their care," writes talk-show host Glenn Beck in his book Glenn Beck's Common Sense, a pox-on-all-their-houses fusillade at Washington. Dashed off in a fever of disillusionment with those in power, Beck's book is selling like vampire lit, with more than 1 million copies in print.
Suppose that Palin somehow channels this grim and possibly gathering sense that America's institutions and authorities are no longer worthy of deference. Suppose that the Obama Administration's expansions of government don't prove as popular--or successful--as Democrats hope. Maybe then she will have picked the right time to declare in her resignation speech, "I've never believed that I, nor anyone else, needs a title" to be effective. In fact, a title might slow you down if your message is that our nation's leaders are so deeply and abidingly inadequate that the only appropriate attitude toward them is scorn.
If not her, maybe someone else. For now, having surrendered her official position, Palin is free to give speeches, write a book and watch for the fish to arrive. A person learns in the Alaska vastness that humans can respond to events but never control them.
The Outsider