Nightmare: Palin/Petraeus 2012

In an article about Sarah Palin in the New York Review of Books, we find this description of her time as Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska:

Palin won by 651 votes to Stein's 440. Installed in the mayor's office, she sacked the town planner, police chief, museum director, and librarian (who was later reinstalled after a public protest), and set about her mission of deregulating Wasilla. Business inventory and personal property taxes were abolished; land was rezoned from residential to commercial to meet the needs of incoming big-box chain stores and fast-food outlets, and from single-family to multi-family to encourage speculative condo development; Palin cast the tie-breaking vote in council to stop the city adopting a building code. She held out the invitation to prospective investors in Wasilla to build what they liked, where they liked, out of any materials and to whatever standards that they chose. The long, unlovely, centerless ribbon of commerce that stretches along Alaska's Highway 3, punctuated by the signage of Subway, I-Hop, Burger King, Arby's, KFC, Taco Bell, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and the like, is a monument to Palin's cherished vision of the free-market, free-enterprise society. As she boasts—justifiably—of her time in Wasilla, "Basically, we'd gotten government out of the way."

And then the writer concludes with this, which I think has merit:

She's much more deeply in touch with her followers than Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, or any other recent candidate who's tried to court the same constituency. (Admittedly, they also lacked her flirty sex appeal.) She has the knack of turning public debate sulfurous with a phrase, as she did last summer with her remark that Democrats want "death panels" in their health plan. She is a catalyst around whom the Tea Party movement[3] is growing alarmingly in size and strength, PAC on PAC, determined to purge the Republican Party of its surviving moderate candidates, like Carly Fiorina and Charlie Crist, as, with Palin's help, it purged Dede Scozzafava in New York's Twenty-third Congressional District. Having hoisted her banner of Commonsense Conservatism, and campaigned across the country by Lear jet and tour bus to promote Going Rogue, she's unlikely to assuage her compulsion to be a winner merely by selling more books than anyone else during 2009's holiday season. She is the stuff of democratic—with a small d—bad dreams.

I can see it now. Palin wins the 2012 Republican nomination, then selects General Petraeus as her running mate. It is a slamdunk for a nation really hurting economically and culturally. 2000 all over again, followed by 2001, and 2003, if you know what I mean.