Oh Sarah, say it ain’t so….

It is too early to say that I was firmly in your corner, but unlike so many others that might take a shot at 2012, I saw your potential.

Perhaps ironically, your enemies saw it clearly as well.  This is why they worked so hard not simply to undermine your credibility, but to make you into a caricature, a laughing stock. They hurled humiliations and banalities at you with a reckless abandon that would be inconceivable for a candidate more to their tastes. 

Consider that if you and Barack Obama had somehow traded places in the media adoration, reporters would have swarmed Kenya, Indonesia and Hawaii seeking parental lineage and the missing birth certificate. The ties to ACORN and ballot stuffing, Reverend Wright and 60s leftist radicals.  Indeed, one might question whether a few years in the Senate was qualification enough to be president.

That the media spent so much time deconstructing the vice presidential candidate in 2008 speaks volumes not to your troubles, real or imagined, but to your potential. That they have continued it over the last six months is only further proof that your enemies needed you to be politically dead and buried because of what you represent.

Sarah, with the counter-culture suddenly running the Establishment in Washington, you were now the counter-culture. Your power lies in your authenticity as a generational equal and the flip side of Obama’s hip urbanism.

You didn’t just talk conservative principles; you live them. You are pro-life, pro-family, pro-gun, pro-faith, rugged individualist; a social and economic conservative who balanced family and career and has been successful at both.

You don’t shoot, fish or ride snowmobiles for the cameras. Your decision to bring a Downs baby to term was a life choice, not a political opportunity.

It is because of this that you are a threat to and the antithesis of what constitutes today’s woman’s movement.

NOW and other liberal interest groups are horrified at the possibility that the first female president of the United States could be a Republican; an advocate of the traditional family and  a free market enthusiast who worked her way up the political chain. For NOW, you can’t be a modern woman, let alone a leading political voice, without supporting abortion rights and a feminist agenda.

For them, you are the definition of gender heresy.

And that authenticity is why you connect so well with the grass roots.  Despite all of the attacks, a little advertised visit by you to a NY town to recognize William Seward for purchasing Alaska drew a crowd of 20,000.  Twenty thousand in a non election year, in one of the bluest states in the union. It is a but an example of your power.

 The Katie Couric interview became the standard by which you were judged during the campaign and since.  But clever liberals kept watching your convention speech, where, only 48 hours after you’d be plucked from Juneau, you gave a flawless, convincing and feisty presentation – the best of the campaign – even as your teleprompter malfunctioned.  Knowing what we know today about the President’s teddy-bear crush on TOTUS, could he have done the same in Denver?

And in tearing you down, they used the ultimate liberal put down – they questioned your intelligence and judged you stupid. And they kept that drumbeat up throughout the campaign. But Sarah, when have the liberals every judged a conservative any other way?  

Look at the press on Ronald Reagan leading up to 1980.  Polarizing, intellectually lazy, ideologically rigid, ill-informed. And the contempt for his ideas, lowering taxes and regulation, standing up for America and American values, providing a robust defense, you’d think he’d just crawled out of a cave.

Gerald Ford?  Always falling down stairs. George HW Bush?  No idea what a super market scanner was.  And we all know about George W. Bush. Despite Harvard and Yale, six years as governor of Texas, “Bush” and “Stupid” get 11 million hits on Google. Yet, the fresh geniuses who took over in January are quietly adopting some of the most controversial policies that caused so much venom-spewing during the campaign.

Put aside the attacks as part of the arena and your future looked crystal clear Sarah. 

Get back to Alaska and make your governance a policy counter-weight to the mischief that Obama and the Democrats were creating in Washington. Your natural advantage was energy.  While Democrats were busy creating scarcity, increasing costs and reducing supply – all without affecting global warming with Cap N Trade, you’d be finishing a public-private partnership on a pipeline bringing energy to Americans. They talked – you acted.

You’d assemble a team of experts – the best in the Republican Party - to create a kitchen cabinet to plan out the next two years.  Re-election in Alaska that framed your persona and positions from the campaign. Building out your State administration’s agenda that would serve as a foil for “spending gone wild” in Washington.  International travel to meet with world leaders. Domestic trips to identify talent meet activists and build an organization.

You would formally step back onto the national stage in a country riddled by debt, stagflation and broken promises.  They would come after you with everything they had, but you would have had three years, not just 48 hours, to prepare. It would not be easy and it would not be certain, but with your instincts and the right field management, it could be done.

But that’s all gone amid this bizarre announcement of retirement.

Sarah, I’ve given you a wide berth to get your footing over the months, and defended you as Democrats and an alarmingly large group of Republicans attacked you publically and privately. You were thrown into the national cauldron, and because of whom you are, the heat was intense. You deserved some slack.

But this, this course of action, it makes no sense, at least not politically.

If you have national aspirations, I have yet to find a credible course or model that gets you to the presidency by resigning now. If your eyes are set on 2012, you have only eight months more experience than you did at the end of the last campaign when there were major questions about your readiness for national office.  Experience will not be an issue for Obama, results will. But if Obama’s ambitious policies have indeed made things worse, will Americans turn to yet another person with limited practical experience?

Maybe you’re smarter than the rest of us hacks, obsessed only by the next election. Maybe you’re looking at 2016, assuming that Team Obama will steamroll whatever sucker the Republicans put up in 2012, no matter the state of the economy. You probably remember all that Obama money and organization better than most.  2016 will be an open year, unless Obama dumps Biden in favor of someone who can carry the mantle. Still, like 2008, it will be a referendum of the last two terms.  But what do you do over the next six years to remain viable?

Could it be a fresh, brewing scandal that resignation allows you to avoid?  After Elliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford, Duke Cunningham and William Jefferson - and let’s not forget Blago - is there anything left that would shock the conscience of the American people?

 In the end, maybe it simply was the abuse and harassment.  I can’t imagine the ultimate indignity of having your children become the filthy fodder for late night talk shows. You live under a microscope in your current public role with a malcontent at every turn, ready to investigate or criticize, and resignation frees you to live in some form of privacy as you step away from the spotlight, raise your family and consider your next move.

But your exit from the public stage leaves a vast vacuum for our Party.

Mitt Romney is smiling that used-car salesman smile extra bright this morning. Maybe his malleability on issues of principle is a sign of our times, but I preferred your steadfast common sense.

Bobby Jindal is probably smiling too, as he searches his face in vain for facial hair.

With Jon Huntsman off to do Obama’s bidding in Beijing and Mark Sanford and John Ensign trapped in a Romeo and Juliet sagas of various proportions, the pickings become slim.

Charlie Crist is running for the Senate so he can run for the White House. But he’s already in a mess of trouble with the Right for saying nice things about the President, taking the stimulus money gladly.  Having put McCain up in ’08, Republican primary voters are not going to settle for fuzzy conservatism next time around.

There’s always John Thune.  He flies under the radar and would have been an ideal VP choice for you.  With you apparently out, Thune gets a strong second look as a genuine conservative who won’t turn off independents.  Remember, he was the Daschle killer.  He is a rising star in the Party.

But with the exception of McCain, Republicans aren’t fond of nominating Senators.  They prefer governors or those that have had a mix of executive experience. 

That puts the spotlight on your dour colleague, Tim Pawlenty, who, interestingly, also declined to face the voters in 2010, though he reasonably decided to stay put in the governor’s mansion until the next inauguration.  With two terms under his belt, and a working theory about how Republicans should appeal to working class Americans, he now joins Romney at the head of the line of Republican hopefuls.

I had no doubt that 2012 was going to be a hard slog for Republicans, Sarah, but it just seemed more reassuring with you in the mix. At the very least, you might have saved me from having to endure the torpid Pawlenty. That may be counter-intuitive for all your doubters and haters out there, but now we’ll probably never know.

This time, you did it to yourself.