Sarah Palin is back, and she says she has ‘nothing to lose’. We should all be afraid

In the beginning, there was Sarah Palin. Long before Marjorie Taylor Greene complained about “Nancy Pelosi’s Gazpacho Police”, even before Donald Trump claimed he was being treated worse than the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, the Governor of Alaska crashed onto the world stage at John McCain’s invitation, and changed everything.

And now, the mama grizzly herself – she who once pardoned a turkey on camera and then gave an interview as its Thanksgiving comrades were executed behind her –  may soon be taking another tilt at elected office. She’s been given an opening by the death of Alaska’s only congressman, Don Young, and to go by an appearance on Hannity last night, she thinks the seat might have her name on it.

Insisting in her signature passive-aggressive staccato that “I never went anywhere,” Palin declared that: “There is a time and a season for everything, and if this season is one where I need a more official platform to have, I’m going to throw my hat in the ring, because we need people that have cajones. We need people like Donald Trump, who has nothing to lose. Like me! We got nothing to lose, and no more of this vanilla milquetoast namby-pamby wussy-pussy stuff that’s been going on. That’s why our country is in the mess that we’re in, because people who run for office, they look at it as a job, as a business, instead of as a calling.”

For all that Palin might claim to see a career in public office as a calling, it’s worth remembering her official career did not end with her being voted out; it ended because she quit her only term as Governor of Alaska just after the halfway point.

Back in her 2009 farewell speech, she claimed that she resigned not to pursue a career of some other kind in the rest of the US, but “because I love Alaska this much that I feel it is my duty to avoid the unproductive, typical ‘politics-as-usual’ lame duck session in one’s last year in office”. And with that, she was off. But where was she going?

She embarked on a haphazard nationwide speaking tour of sorts (largely confined to the lower 48); published the contradiction-riddled political memoir Going Rogue: An American Life; endorsed the “birther” lie about Barack Obama then being pushed by Trump; told ageing Tea Partiers that Obamacare would see them euthanized on the orders of “death panels”; and fronted a reality show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, that followed her placidly mundane post-official life on the Last Frontier.

If the plan was for these efforts to congeal into a presidential campaign, it didn’t work. Palin was before long reduced to increasingly embarrassing speaking engagements and waving scrawled lists of political enemies in front of cameras. What high-profile appearances she did make became more and more erratic, with her astonishing silver-fringed Trump endorsement speech proving so detached from normalcy that it tempted Tina Fey back to Saturday Night Live. And the less said about her rapping on The Masked Singer, the better.

Presentation-wise, Palin really hit a nadir in late 2020 with a monumentally strange Allen Ginsberg-meets-Fargo video attacking home-state Senator Lisa Murkowski over her stance on the then-looming Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. Essentially a compilation of botched takes shot selfie-style outside Palin’s home and then edited almost randomly into a postmodern word salad, the clip is Palin’s apogee: the woman whom John McCain chose to place just a heartbeat away from the presidency repeats herself over and over, halting randomly mid-sentence then racing back to life like a jammed chainsaw, glowering with raw energy as she picks twigs off her camera and rants about how “there’s a time and a place to go rogue” – all while inexplicably wearing a single yellow glove.

Yet only a couple of months later, Palin appeared to be just about ready to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Appearing on the stump for doomed Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, she was somehow back on a relatively even keel. It was a reminder that she always had the promise of being a good campaigner, even if she does have a tendency to shoot herself verbally in the foot. Even during the worst of the 2008 debacle, she was uncommonly good at handling a crowd, able to project a cultivated folksy-yet-tough persona of weaponized victimhood combined with a gentle magnetism that few other nationally known Republicans of the era ever mustered.

That Georgia appearance was fully two years ago now, and whatever’s happened to her in the interim, the Palin who talked to Hannity last night seemed ready. No longer did it look like she fully inhabited the twilight zone where she’s spent much of the last decade – a dark territory now patrolled by the likes of Mike Lindell, Lin Wood and Lara Logan.

Yes, she still struggles to get to the end of a sentence without beginning another. Yes, her rationale for why she should hold any given elected office instead of anyone else is thin to the point of nonexistence. No, she is no better qualified, no more honest and not demonstrably any better informed than she was in 2008. But in the 13-plus years since John McCain offered her the dopamine hit of national attention, what once passed for the standards of American politics have collapsed around the establishment’s ears.

It might just be that instead of Sarah Palin catching up with reality, the country has finally caught up with her.