ok i worked pretty hard on palin back in the day. i'm a sucker for the common touch: palin's is not simulated, and you can't have it both ways: i.e. she's an ignorant fool and a super-clever manipulator. i like her life, which i think has a lot to do with america, more or less: her parenthood (she has babies along with her on her book tour; i'm ready to be ruled by mom); her faith (which offhand i say is more sincere than that of 90% of conservatives); even the hunting and guns. she's amazingly plain-spoken, all in all; there's a reason that the mccain campaign couldn't control her rhetoric.
whatever the racial and other content of this - which is a problem - i agree with teapartiers etc that we are losing (have lost) america, understood in terms of individualism, self-reliance, frontier can-do attitude, liberty, and so on. all we really want now is to be controlled and coddled by the infinitely-large state, by a horde of besuited bureaucrats who are indistinguishable from one another, who all say the same. sarah actually knows this.
she's no less intelligent or less truthful than joe biden, say, or than the average american politician, but her educational road was more of a struggle, and her rhetoric/syntx is not all that polished. it's charming, though, and effective.
she's a perfect foil to obama precisely in her extreme roughness and imperfection: superman vs. everywoman.
she's cute as a button.
i have many substantive policy disagreements. but her basic small-gov conservatism has plenty to recommend it at this point. don't worry: i'll roll hard left during sarah's presidency.