What Happened to Sarah Palin?

Joshua Green goes back to Sarah Palin's fight against the oil companies in Alaska, and asks what might have been:

Let’s stop here and go back for a moment to the convention speech—the alchemic moment of excitement and fantasy when Sarah Palin became the star of national politics. Listening to it today, you can practically hear her shift registers, the state figure morphing into a national one, the old Palin becoming the new. She touches on the pipeline, the corruption, how she broke the oil companies’ “monopoly on power” and ended a “culture of self-dealing.” But all of that is overshadowed by the full-throated assault on Barack Obama, rooted in deep cultural resentment, that became the campaign’s ethos and remains Palin’s identity. What resonate are her charges that Obama wanted to “forfeit” the war in Iraq and that he condescended to “working people” with talk of “how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns.”
That didn’t carry her to Washington, but it did reshape the contours of American politics. Today, there aren’t many Republicans of the type Palin was in Alaska; but nearly every Republican seeking the White House strives to evoke the more grievance-driven themes of her convention speech. Regardless of whether she runs too, her influence will be more broadly and deeply felt than anyone else’s. But it’s hard to believe that her party, or her country, or even Palin herself, is better off for that.
What if history had written a different ending? What if she had tried to do for the nation what she did for Alaska? The possibility is tantalizing and not hard to imagine. The week after the Republican convention, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and the whole economy suddenly seemed poised to go down with it. Palin might have been the torchbearer of reform, a role that would have come naturally. Everything about her—the aggressiveness, the gift for articulating resentments, her record and even her old allies in Alaska—would once more have been channeled against a foe worth pursuing. Palin, not Obama, might ultimately have come to represent “Change We Can Believe In.” What had he done that could possibly compare with how she had faced down special interests in Alaska?

I am violating my original rule of not mentioning Sarah Palin unless she announces a run for President, which I made on my first day of blogging.  I think she may have come up in an aside on a post or two, but I generally haven't followed her soap opera.  I think this article is definitely worth reading, as it presents an interesting portrayal of Alaska, the oil industry and Sarah Palin's amazing, really, accomplishment in taking on her own party and  Big Oil.  I think it is interesting when mentioning the convention speech that he also doesn't mention the mantra of that convention, "Drill, Baby, Drill."  Somehow, the ultimate slogan of obsequiousness to Big Oil became the rallying cry most often voiced by the one opponent of the industry in Alaska that beat them.  Unfortunately, the former governor's personal flaws and biases combined with her competitive nature to undermine all that she actually did accomplish.  I think Joshua Green's article title is correct, "The Tragedy of Sarah Palin."  The whole thing is worth reading.