No, look ahead...
"...But if he [McCain] doesn’t [win], the coulda-shoulda-wouldas will be withering and ceaseless, with Palin’s role in the defeat the subject of a furious interpretive battle between her detractors and defenders.
The contours of that battle and its outcome will be of more than academic interest. They will be central to the coming struggle for the soul of the Republican Party and to Palin’s future. Here in deep-blue Gotham, many people assume that her destiny is sealed: a one-way ticket back to Wasilla. But the truth is that Palin is likely to be a significant player on the national stage for years to come. As a galvanizing, maybe polarizing, figure in the conservative movement. As a folk hero on the talk-radio–Fox News right. And possibly, possibly, as the GOP front-runner in 2012.
That Palin in the final days of the campaign was already looking toward the next election cycle was glaringly evident—not least in some quarters inside McCain-land, where it caused no small degree of consternation. Her public (via Bill Kristol) challenging of McCain for not bringing up Barack Obama’s association with Jeremiah Wright, her objection to the campaign’s withdrawal from Michigan, her insistence on giving policy speeches during the home stretch, her loud and off-message effort to defend herself regarding her $150,000 wardrobe splurge: All of it seemed focused more on playing to the base or repairing her reputation than on helping McCain to win.
For a candidate whose public image has taken the battering that Palin’s has in the past two months, focusing on the post-election horizon seems both natural and drenched in chutzpah. But Palin surely knows that many prominent figures in the conservative movement—from Morton Blackwell to Brent Bozell—see in her the potential to emerge in time as a next-generation, XX-chromosome Ronald Reagan. Indeed, on November 5, an assemblage of the movement’s leaders will take place at a private weekend home in rural Virginia to begin discussing a way forward for the GOP in the age of Obama (if he wins, that is), with Palin’s role high on the agenda."
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