As much as I wanted to like Palin, her positions on a lot of issues turned me off, and she wound up being woefully unprepared for the campaign. The whole smear campaign added to it, and I think she had almost no chance of ever being elected for anything, even before she quit as Governor. I wanted her to be a conservative, intelligent, fresh voice in national politics. Sadly, it didn’t happen. I agree that any R would have had an almost insurmountable task to defeat the Obama juggernaut, after 8 years of W. I “hope” we haven’t seen the complete exile of sanity from the GOP, but it’s not looking good right now.