The Palin Hangover

By Dee Dee Myers, Vanity Fair

28 July 12

hen Mitt Romney returns from his overseas summer vacation next week, speculation about his running mate is bound to reach a fevered pitch—and stay there until he makes an announcement. As the putative short list ebbs and flows, adding and then deleting names in flurries of anticipation, one thing is clear: thanks to Sarah Palin, Romney won’t choose a woman.

It’s been nearly four years since Palin was plucked from obscurity, with six years as a small-town mayor and two as governor of a remote and sparsely populated state as her only credentials for national office. Since then, virtually everything we’ve learned about the process that produced her—and we’ve learned a lot—has confirmed our worst suspicions: Palin was a political Hail Mary, a long bomb in the closing minutes of a game that John McCain and Co. were certain to lose. They didn’t care if she had the policy or political or emotional capacity to serve as vice president, let alone president. They were willing to drive the country off a cliff, if that’s what it took to win.

In those same four years, Palin’s performance has done nothing to reassure us that it would have been anything short of a disaster if she and McCain had managed to win. During the campaign, she often dazzled crowds on the campaign trail. But her legendary gaffes and often tentative demeanor in less scripted moments betrayed a weak grasp of issues, from U.S-Russia relations, to the economy, to basic American history.

Despite its turmoil, the campaign still created a huge opportunity for Palin to later leverage her sudden fame and undeniable charisma into a meaningful political career. She didn’t take it. Instead, she quit her job as governor, refused to buckle down and educate herself about important issues, and decided she’d rather be a gadfly than a productive part of an important national conversation.

And so it is that for a national candidate to choose a relatively unknown woman from a small state as his running mate is impossible.

Oh, sure, the names of potential female candidates have been bandied about. It’s 2012; the G.O.P. simply has to at least pretend to consider a couple of female running mates for the party’s über-white-guy nominee. And there are several who would be interesting, credible, and potentially exciting. But with the exception of former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice—who has absolutely no interest in running for elective office—they are all first-termers from small states and thus appear dangerously Palin-like. As they might say in Wasilla, ix-nay on the replay.

Last week, as Romney’s role at Bain Capital dominated the political conversation, his campaign tried to change the subject by floating New Hampshire senator Kelly Ayotte as a possible running mate. A cool-headed conservative, former prosecutor, and sitting member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Ayotte, 44, is a rising star in the G.O.P. firmament. But she represents a small (albeit swing) state and is only two years into her first term. But for Sarah Palin, the Romney camp might have argued that Ayotte has as much experience in the Senate as Barack Obama did when he announced that he was running for president in 2007. But Palin herself made a similar argument in 2008—and it proved specious.

Similarly, Susana Martinez of New Mexico, the nation’s first female Hispanic governor, would be an interesting candidate. A no-nonsense Republican, Martinez, 53, switched parties in the mid-1980s and spent most of her career as a prosecutor, including 14 years as a district attorney. She’s well respected in New Mexico, a state that remains a jump ball. Yet despite the fact that she could narrow Romney’s gap among women and Hispanics—and help him win a swing state—the Palin hangover ensures she won’t even be considered.

South Carolina governor Nikki Haley might also have been on the list. A successful business owner before she ran for the state legislature, Haley is the American-born daughter of Indian immigrants who embodies the American Dream. While pigs would fly before President Obama could win South Carolina in a general election, Haley would have helped paint a picture of a more modern Republican party: younger, more diverse, more open. But because of the Palin debacle, she’s nowhere in the conversation.

Palin’s politics aren’t the problem. Nor is it the fact that she and McCain lost in 2008. Palin actually showed admirable resilience during the campaign, as she was thrust onto the national stage by a campaign that failed epically to prepare or protect her. There’s no doubt that she is gifted in the art of politics, and I do mean that as a compliment. What she has can’t be taught.

The McCain campaign bears more than a little of the blame for the Palin predicament. They set her up to fail for shortsighted and cynical reasons. But the fact remains that she was spectacularly unprepared to serve as vice president, let alone president—and she didn’t do much then, and hasn’t done much since, to fill the gaps in her knowledge or experience. Had she, she could have emerged an important player on the national political stage, rather than merely a controversial and divisive one. Had she, she could have shown the world that even though her candidacy may have been born in desperation, she was up to the task. Instead, she’s become a cautionary tale—and an obstacle to other women who might have successfully followed in her footsteps.

So it isn’t fate but fecklessness that has shoved Sarah Palin to the sidelines of national politics. The real tragedy is that she’s taken a lot of other serious Republican women with her.