The Outsider: Where Is Sarah Palin Going Next?

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Where does Sarah Palin go next? To the bank. She has already announced plans to write a book; her advance is reportedly in the millions. A celebrity of her wattage commands huge money on the lecture circuit, and at as much as $100,000 per speech, she can exceed her official salary in a couple of days. Attractive and garrulous, Palin seems born to host a cable-TV show.

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She also has a standing invitation to a lovefest with America's social conservatives. Like opera or scrapple, Palin is something of an acquired taste, a phenomenon loved by some, detested by others, with an uncomprehending vastness in between. But for those who don't get it, here's a thumbnail sketch of her rightward appeal: For the pro-life movement, this cheerful mother of a Down-syndrome baby is a rousing affirmation. For the gun-rights movement, she's a glamorous, moose-hunting shot of adrenaline. She hates on the media, never forgets the troops and is a walking middle finger to the BosNYWash élite. As Rush Limbaugh interrupted his vacation to declare, "She is going to continue to fire up people in the conservative Republican base as often as she speaks to them." (Read "Sarah: The Palin Biography.")

A recent Gallup survey asked American adults whether they have become more conservative or more liberal in recent years, and the answer might suggest a bumpier road ahead for the Administration. Despite the Democratic sweep in 2008, "more conservative" prevailed 2 to 1. Being strong with the right is not a bad place for a woman of ambition to get started.

Outside her family's Dillingham smokehouse, Palin lays out a robust indictment of the Obama agenda. "President Obama is growing government outrageously, and it's immoral and it's uneconomic," she says. "The debt that our nation is incurring, trillions of dollars that we're passing on to our kids, expecting them to pay off for us, is immoral and doesn't even make economic sense. So his growth-of-government agenda needs to be ratcheted back, and it's going to take good people who have the guts to stand up to him." (See highlights from a debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin.)

She continues. The cap-and-trade energy plan "is going to drive the cost of consumer goods and the cost of energy so extremely high." Democratic health-care proposals, she says, look increasingly like the ideas that McCain proposed during the campaign. "One thing reporters aren't asking the Administration is — it's such a simple question, and people around here in the real world, outside of Washington, D.C., want reporters to ask — President Obama, how are you going to pay for this one- or two- or three-trillion-dollar health-care plan? How are you going to pay off the stimulus package, those borrowed dollars? How are you going to pay for so many things that you are proposing and you are implementing? Americans deserve to know."

For Palin, the question might be, How thin a résumé and how unconventional a background will voters embrace? Obama — a first-term Senator with roots in Hawaii, Kenya and Indonesia — moved the bar quite a distance. But would the same country that picked the lofty, cerebral liberal turn around four years later and embrace an earthy, instinctive conservative? After all, President Obama will also be a lot more experienced in 2012. (Read "Sarah Palin's Alaskonomics.")

Whatever else we take away from Palin's abrupt announcement that she is quitting, she has proved that her low opinion of government includes even her own powers and prerogatives. As she put it in her farewell speech — the one that began "Hi, Alaska!" — the governor's office is no longer a place for "productive, fulfilled people ... choosing to wisely utilize precious time." A lot of conservative politicians stop wanting smaller government the minute the government is them. Then they discover that they like the trappings, earmarks and junkets, the plums for friends. For Palin, the job offered little more than "lame-duck status — hit the road, draw the paycheck and milk it."

So, bye, Alaska! She made her declaration on Independence Day weekend as a symbol, she says, of her new and exhilarating freedom. She's headed to a bookstore, a television set, a convention hall near you, armed with an anti-résumé. Cut loose from her obligations to her huge and awesome homeland, her message remains quintessentially Alaskan. Where she comes from — the last American frontier — the past is irrelevant, the rules are suspended, and limitations are for losers.

— With reporting by Karen Tumulty / Washington; Michael Scherer / Rome; and Andrea Sachs / New York

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