Sarah Palin Just Resigned: Why?

Sarah Palin quit the governor’s office so that she could fight for Alaska.

What?

OK, no one really believes that. But no one really expected Palin to announce, on July 3rd, that she was stepping down from the governorship of America’s northernmost state. It’s been widely believed that Palin would run for president in 2012, as she hasn’t exactly been circumspect about her ultimate goals.

The biggest criticism of Palin on the campaign trail—and after it—was that she was unqualified, that her single unfinished term as governor of a sparsely populated, oil-rich state didn’t prepare her to deal with the complexities of running an entire country. John McCain’s aides have continued to drop comments into the press about Palin’s incompetence months after his opponent took office, but as other GOP hopefuls drop off the stage (paging Mark Sanford), Palin seems to have decided that now was her chance to seize the spotlight… by telling America that she was going to forego the chance to gain more experience.

In a spectacularly incoherent speech, loaded with bizarre basketball analogies and claims about the wonderful things she’s done for Alaska, Palin declared that she would not run for reelection. Then, because apparently lame duck governors always run around the country ignoring their state, and doing that would be unfair to the people of Alaska, she declared that she would turn power over to her lieutenant governor, Sean Parnell.

Nowhere did she mention a third option, which would’ve been to finish out her term and keep governing, bringing more of those Ethics Reforms (capitalization straight from the governor’s Web site) that are apparently her specialty. From her speech:

“We need those who will respect our Constitution where government’s supposed to serve from the BOTTOM UP, not move toward this TOP DOWN big government take-over… but rather, will be protectors of individual rights – who also have enough common sense to acknowledge when conditions have drastically changed and are willing to call an audible and pass the ball when it’s time so the team can win! And that is what I’m doing!” [Once again, capitalization, spelling, and punctuation straight from the governor’s site.

Will Inglis, a political activist from Alaska, said,

“This proves what a lot of people have thought since she ran for VP; that the governorship had taken a back seat to her national ambitions. This shows an incredible lack of character for her to not finish out her time in the office that she was elected to. She hasn’t accomplished any of her stated goals such as lowering energy costs for Alaskans and getting work started on the natural gas pipeline. She obviously wasn’t cut out for the job, and has demonstrated that she is not qualified for any higher office.”

Palin is such an easy joke that it’s easy to sit back and laugh at her, yet one has to assume that she has some sort of team advising her on issues like this. Speculation started almost immediately upon her announcement that perhaps she had a job offer as a Fox News analyst or perhaps an eye on the Senate seat held by Lisa Murkowski, but I’d be willing to bet that the target of Palin’s intentions is still the White House, and in her thoughts this makes her look even more maverick-y and thus, in some way, more appealing to the rest of the country.

Either that, or she just can’t stand one more minute in Alaska.

It’s hard to see how this move can work out well for Palin. She’s got her hardcore supporters—probably a good portion of the tea party protesters scheduled to come out again in droves on July 4 to declare independence from some nebulous socialist fascism defined by a government spending money to try to keep people from starving in a recession teetering on the razor’s edge of depression. Beyond that, though, she’ll have to win over Americans who didn’t buy into “drill, baby, drill” as an energy policy and weren’t won over already by folksy comments about her kids.

Simply put, Palin’s image problem isn’t that she doesn’t have a national profile, like so many other governors who dream of DC. It’s that she has one—and it’s bad. It’s hard to see how quitting her job early, with no plans to gain political experience in the next three years before the next presidential election, will improve her profile.