Is Sarah Palin A Liberal Plot?

That seems to be David Boaz's belief:

"Talk about Sarah Palin running for president continues to mount — in the liberal media. Conservatives smile and look away when the topic is raised. They want to watch her on TV, they want to turn out for her lively speeches, but they don’t see her as a president.

Liberals, on the other hand, are jumping up and down at the prospect of a Palin candidacy. She could win! they urgently insist to skeptical Republicans; you should get behind her. Don’t throw us Democrats in that Palin briar patch! The latest example is the star columnist of the New York Times, Frank Rich. His Sunday column is titled “Could She Reach the Top in 2012? You Betcha.” Palin’s got a huge television presence, Rich says — 5 million viewers for her new TLC series. Which is slightly less than the 65 million it would take to win a presidential election. She’s running, he says; her upcoming book tour “disproportionately dotes on the primary states of Iowa and South Carolina.” Well, yes, she’s going to both those states, along with 14 others."

Oh, poppycock. Liberals didn't put her on the 2008 ticket. We didn't put her on Fox News. And we're not the ones making her books into bestsellers. We're not in the party that's giving her an 80 percent approval rating. And we're not the ones scouting office space in Iowa for her. There's something going on there, and it's not the left's fault.

Undoubtedly there's a few liberals who would like to see Palin win the GOP nomination because they think she'd be easy for Obama to beat in 2012. I'm not one of those people: I'd like to see the Republican Party put forth a credible, non-demagogic leader who is capable of leading the entire country. But the reason many, probably most, liberals talk about Sarah Palin is because she's clearly connected to the id of the GOP, and would seem to thus have a realistic chance of contending for her party's nomination. A conservative friend says: " I'd wager she raises more money for Democrats than she does for Republicans." And that may be true. But one could say the same thing about Hillary Clinton's profile among Republicans for most of the last 20 years; she nearly became president, and it's not because conservatives were secretly trying to push her into being the Democratic Party's mistake. Sarah Palin is a real phenomenon, but she's not a liberal one.