Published: July 11, 2009 01:19 am      

HOWEY: From governor to 'Queen of Pop'?

It was about a year ago with rampant speculation on an Obama-Clinton ticket that I started scouting the Internet for the Republican “Hillary.”

There were the obvious ones: Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Christine Todd Whitman and Condi Rice, and ... not many others. This is the party of white, middle-aged men; where only 35 national convention delegates were black; where alienating the Latino vote in 2006 became a GOP blood sport (memo to John Hostettler and Chris Chocola: Latinos reproduce and vote much more profusely than gays).

I had heard about the governor from Alaska and checked out the state Web site. There I found Gov. Sarah Palin and First Dude Todd. Very attractive woman. Nice looking family. She seemed like a progressive, having run against entrenched Republicans on a reform movement that brought her to power in a stunning upset. There she was: John McCain’s running mate. The first female Republican ascending to the ticket.

The story line was this: Obama had passed on gender for talkative Joe Biden. McCain had wanted to make a different kind of history and bring estranged Democrat Joe Lieberman on to the ticket. But social Republicans were promising a floor revolt, so McCain chose Palin.

It was a gutsy move, I thought. Palin’s unveiling was promising. She had the looks, spunk and gumption. Here was a success story from one of America’s last frontiers.

And then came September.

This was the month of disaster. For America, it was the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the Wall Street meltdown. We began getting the first indicators that the “Detroit 3” was on the brink. People began throwing the “trillions” number around and there was talk of the “D-word.” It began dawning on people that American was headed for a potential economic catastrophe.

It was at this moment that Palin stumbled. Her network interviews with Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson were disasters. She had trouble with the simplest questions. These anchors weren’t playing “gotcha.” They were playing “getting to know you.” And Sarah Palin flunked. She flunked as she stood with the oldest presidential nominee in history, with actuaries noting that there was a 20 percent chance he wouldn’t live to finish a first term.

This crystallized on NBC’s Saturday Night Live when Tina Fey didn’t even have to make up satire: she used Palin’s answers verbatim. Americans laughed and howled and winced.

By the time Sarah Palin came to Indiana in October, she was the darling of the social conservatives who already hated and distrusted the news media. Palin didn’t have to convince them. She didn’t have to act or sound smart. She just had to play the victim card. Nearly 20,000 people endured a rush hour traffic jam to see her at Verizon Music Center at Noblesville. A similar amount showed up at Jeffersonville a few weeks later.

During this time, there were telltale signs from the Hoosier Republican establishment that Palin was a problem. There were no congratulatory press releases from Sen. Dick Lugar or any of the Hoosier congressmen or Gov. Mitch Daniels, an early supporter of McCain. Daniels was “too busy” to appear with her at Verizon. At her second Indiana event, Gov. Daniels showed up in the parking lot to greet supporters, but didn’t appear with Gov. Palin.

After the election, many of us thought she’d go back to Alaska, study up, and lead. She could finish out her term, set up a presidential campaign, move down to the lower 48 and set up a campaign HQ in Boise, and, perhaps, she could polish herself up to pass as a credible candidate.

Instead, Palin and her family became tabloid fodder. She did a press interview “pardoning” a Thanksgiving Turkey as turkey heads were being lopped off in the background (nice staff work there). She had a disastrous session with the Alaska General Assembly, which for the first time in history refused to seat a cabinet nominee.

Still, Sarah Palin was hot property. When she appeared at a Right to Life dinner in Evansville last April, thousands of Hoosiers showed up to see her, to listen to her. And here she talked passionately about her son that she discovered would be born with Down Syndrome. “That blew me away, it rocked my world… It was a time I asked myself, was I going to walk the walk?” she asked.

Therein lies Palin’s power with the social conservatives. She knows how to touch them. When Palin finished speaking, many Hoosiers rushed to her and told her to run for president.

Last Friday, Gov. Palin quit. “As I thought about this announcement that I would not seek reelection, I thought about how much fun other governors have as lame ducks: They maybe travel around their state, travel to other states, maybe take their overseas international trade missions,” Palin said in yet another rambling speech. “I’m not going to put Alaskans through that. I’m not wired to operate under the same old politics as usual.”

Instead, she talked of a “higher calling” and did nothing to tamp down talk that a 2012 presidential run was coming.

As for Sarah Palin abruptly quitting and her higher calling? My friend Rick Wilkerson noted on his Facebook page that she might have resigned to assume the vacated throne of the King of Pop.

Brian Howey is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com