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2012? You Betcha!: And she’ll be a stronger candidate than you think. Does Sarah Palin have Reagan potential? (John Heilemann, Nov 2, 2008, New York Magazine)

Here in deep-blue Gotham, many people assume that her destiny is sealed: a one-way ticket back to Wasilla. But the truth is that Palin is likely to be a significant player on the national stage for years to come. As a galvanizing, maybe polarizing, figure in the conservative movement. As a folk hero on the talk-radio–Fox News right. And possibly, possibly, as the GOP front-runner in 2012.

That Palin in the final days of the campaign was already looking toward the next election cycle was glaringly evident—not least in some quarters inside McCain-land, where it caused no small degree of consternation. Her public (via Bill Kristol) challenging of McCain for not bringing up Barack Obama’s association with Jeremiah Wright, her objection to the campaign’s withdrawal from Michigan, her insistence on giving policy speeches during the home stretch, her loud and off-message effort to defend herself regarding her $150,000 wardrobe splurge: All of it seemed focused more on playing to the base or repairing her reputation than on helping McCain to win.

For a candidate whose public image has taken the battering that Palin’s has in the past two months, focusing on the post-election horizon seems both natural and drenched in chutzpah. But Palin surely knows that many prominent figures in the conservative movement—from Morton Blackwell to Brent Bozell—see in her the potential to emerge in time as a next-generation, XX-chromosome Ronald Reagan. Indeed, on November 5, an assemblage of the movement’s leaders will take place at a private weekend home in rural Virginia to begin discussing a way forward for the GOP in the age of Obama (if he wins, that is), with Palin’s role high on the agenda.

The case for Palin as a conservative standard-bearer isn’t hard to discern. She has electrified the Republican grassroots as no candidate has in years. In their size and enthusiasm, the crowds that come to see her on the stump rival or even exceed those that greeted Obama a few years ago, when he first burst on the scene. Her charisma and performance skills, so dazzling when she made her debut in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the Republican convention, were vividly on display when I saw her in Erie. Again and again, she whipped the throng into a frenzy with her barbed attacks on Obama. Her command of right-wing dog-whistle rhetoric is total. Speaking of her devotion to helping special-needs children, she seamlessly inserted a coded pro-life appeal: “John [McCain] and I have a vision of America where every innocent life counts.”

The constituency to which Palin appeals is clear and well defined: populist conservatives of all stripes and Evangelicals in particular.

That's not a constituency, that's the base of the GOP. And the last two candidates with appeal to the base this strong were W and Ronald Reagan. She could only be stopped by someone with similarly strong appeal, which means only Jeb.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 4, 2008 6:56 AM