Sarah Palin is resigning

A shocker. No word about whether she intends to run for president in 2012, but it seems unlikely now, don't you think? But on second thought, perhaps she's thinking that the time she needs to spend traveling the lower 48 building a political base will take away from the time she ought to spend governing Alaska -- that is, that she can't be an effective governor of a state as far away as Alaska is (I was startled to discover that it takes about as long to fly from Dallas to London as it does to fly from Dallas to Anchorage) and an effective 2012 presidential candidate. In fact, reading the Anchorage Daily News story, I'm betting that's exactly what she's going to do.

Well, that's too bad. She probably could have been a good governor. I doubt she will ever have the gravitas to be president. Charles Krauthammer said on Fox the other night:

She is -- she has star power without any doubt. She has an extremely devoted following. But she is not a serious candidate for the presidency.

She had to go home and study and spend a lot of time on issues in which she was not adept last year, and she hasn't. She has to stop speaking in clichés and platitudes. It won't work.

It could work for eight weeks if you're the number two candidate, as she was last year. But even so, she got singed a lot in that campaign. You cannot sustain a campaign of platitudes and clichés over a year and a half if you're running for the presidency.

Perhaps she's been convinced to spend the next two years studying hard. I doubt it can work. How do you get up to speed in two years on issues you really haven't thought about until now? Do you think she could pull off mounting a credible, successful bid for the GOP presidential nomination? (Which is not the same question as asking whether she ought to be president).