Like Marcia, Marcia, Marcia, only Jan shoots wolves from helicopters.

Two bits over at Sullivan’s place that tie together - first a live quip from Charles Krauthammer:

“[Palin] is not a serious candidate for the presidency. She had to go home and study and spend a lot of time on issues in which she was not adept last year, and she hasn’t. She has to stop speaking in clichés and platitudes. It won’t work. It could work for eight weeks if you’re the number two candidate, as she was last year. But even so, she got singed a lot in that campaign. You cannot sustain a campaign of platitudes and clichés over a year and a half if you’re running for the presidency.”

The second a line from Ed Kilgore:

the ecstatic reaction to her choice on the Cultural Right didn’t get much attention. She wasn’t an “unknown” or a “fresh face” to those folks. They knew her not only as a truly hard-line anti-abortionist, but as a politician who had uniquely “walked the walk” by carrying a pregnancy to term despite knowing the child would have a severe disability. And all the personality traits she later exhibited–the folksiness, the abrasive partisanship, the hostility towards the “media” and “elites,” the resentment of the establishment Republicans who tried to “manage” her, and the constant complaints of persecution–almost perfectly embodied the world-view, and the hopes and fears, of the grassroots Cultural Right. (This was particularly and understandably true of women, who have always played an outsized role in grassroots conservative activism.) Sarah Palin was the projection of these activists onto the national political scene, and exhibited the defiant pride and ill-disguised vulnerability that they would have felt in the same place.

But also the cluelessness - the unfamiliarity with the actual issues, and the attitude that those issues don’t really matter, and the resentment when anyone suggests otherwise.

I hate to keep coming back to this, but we only do because it’s so true - she was “one of them,” they “felt it in their gut,” and so her actual aptitude didn’t matter, and still doesn’t.

So Krauthammer is wrong. Platitudes and cliches were perfectly fine for Palin’s biggest fans, and they’ll continue to be, next time around.

Update: Read also, if you haven’t, the story of how Palin freaked out at the reporting that her husband has been a member of the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party - how she lied about the party, saying secession was not part of its platform (it pretty much WAS its platform), how her husband got involved only inadvertently (he was a member for 7 years), and demanded that the McCain campaign staffers “fix” it; and how the McCain staff pushed back against her demand that they get out there and lie.

Notes Sullivan about that pushback, by McCain staffer Steve Schmidt:

These are the words of a sane professional grappling with smeone who can only be called a pathological whack-job, unable to accept criticism and responding to it with pathetic untruths and diva-flame-outs and personal vendettas. This person could have been a heartbeat away from being president of the United States in a moment of economic crisis and national security peril. Her selection remains the most surreal moment in modern American political history. That she is a serious candidate to be the GOP nominee in 2012 is a sign of something very, very seriously wrong with the contemporary American right.

It’ll be on full display at the tea parties this weekend, pretty much.