Artur Davis: Has Sarah Palin Been Eclipsed?

There is no spot left for Sarah Palin in the starting lineup. The evangelical woman with a grassroots appeal to the party’s base? The unvarnished conservative who thrives on the liberal establishment’s disdain? Both roles are firmly taken.

What should gall Palin is that it did not have to be this way. Neither Michele Bachmann nor Rick Perry were remotely plausible national figures a year ago, and they exist today because of ground that Palin was too unfocused to occupy.

Palin doesn’t add up: she is a gifted stump speaker who still kept repeating her convention speech in 08 for months to crowds who had heard all the lines before; she frets about the establishment’s failure to take her governing skills seriously, but abandons a governorship that would have allowed her to burnish her credentials as a substantive reformer. She wonders why her toughness is questioned, then confesses that she left the governorship because she was worn down by ethics complaints from a gadfly.

Sarah Palin has formidable campaign talents, but none of the will to use those assets to gain power. That makes her reassuringly normal as a person, but it will never carry her anywhere near the presidency.

(Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from Politico’s Arena)