If you haven't read it yet, it is all the rage. Todd Purdum has written a masterful and entertaining article in Vanity Fair about the Governor of Alaska, that conservative pin up girl, Sarah Palin. While there are a number of new interesting tidbits, the general gist we already knew. Sarah Palin was a disaster. Even if she got the rabid conservative base to foam at the mouth to the rest of us she was clearly unqualified to be one wink away from the Presidency. He writes:

Palin is unlike any other national figure in modern American life--neither Anna Nicole Smith nor Margaret Chase Smith but a phenomenon all her own. The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her and her extended clan--the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game--give her family a singular status in the rogues' gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection. Palin's life has sometimes played out like an unholy amalgam of Desperate Housewives and Northern Exposure.

More like at Northern Overexposure at this point. Sarah Palin may drive the conservative base into a frenzy who view her as some sort of female Ronald Reagan but to the politically astute, not to mention the just plain awake, she's just not all there. She's erratic, uncertain of facts and simply just not sufficiently prepared to play a leading role on the national stage. And if she's the last of the red hot conservatives, then truly the conservative brand is in trouble. If the GOP were to nominate her again even as Vice President, I am not sure the Republican Party would live to see another day. In the end, Sarah Palin will be a footnote in American history, the first female Vice Presidential candidate on a Republican ticket and the second overall on a major party ticket. She is as much trivia as trivial.