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Book tour: A reading on Palin future?

WASHINGTON - Sarah Palin is embarking on what is likely to be the most commercially successful book tour by a politician since Barack Obama launched The Audacity of Hope three years ago. Obama's book tour spawned a presidential campaign. Will Palin's eventually do the same?

WASHINGTON - Sarah Palin is embarking on what is likely to be the most commercially successful book tour by a politician since Barack Obama launched The Audacity of Hope three years ago. Obama's book tour spawned a presidential campaign. Will Palin's eventually do the same?

Her ultimate ambitions remain a mystery. The opening stage of the tour for her book, Going Rogue, has been marked by the same qualities that have defined the public reaction to her since that morning in Ohio when she was announced as John McCain's choice for vice president: curiosity and controversy.

Give Palin credit. She has a gift for attracting attention. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) said recently that she has "the quality that every politician wants to have: She's interesting. Most politicians would swap about anything for that quality."

But with such attention comes controversy. The first reports about the book, thanks to the Associated Press, have reignited her wars with McCain's campaign team, this time over her assertion that the campaign billed her $50,000 for the cost of her vice presidential vetting. Not so, McCain advisers said.

Palin will travel from one book signing to another aboard a bus that will make the tour appear very much like an extension of her campaign for vice president - or the beginning of a new campaign. She will be riding what one fellow Republican calls a backlash among many conservatives against the treatment she has received from the media and much of the political establishment.

The book tour will provide the subtext for a bigger discussion of what kind of political future Palin might have - or, more importantly, what she might want to have. Is she merely a political personality, or is there something unique that could be called "Palinism" that defines a political philosophy that could help her party win elections and turn her into a viable national candidate?

There is no conclusive evidence that Palin intends to use the book tour to define more clearly her political philosophy or to fill out her profile. The book appears to be partly an effort to settle scores, and for now she might be as interested in making some money for herself and her family. The future can wait.

But the eventual answer to the question of what kind of political future she may have rests with how Palin performs. As former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich put it a few weeks ago: "If she grows, she'll be the Republican nominee. More than anybody else in the party, her future is in her hands."

Gingrich said he expected an "amazing" book tour for the former Alaska governor, with enthusiastic audiences at her signings and plenty of media coverage. "If in the process she begins to develop a sophisticated message and she begins to do interviews where people say, you know, she was maligned and there's a lot more there than I thought, she'll be very formidable - and she'll be the front-runner by February or March."

Right now, public opinion on Palin is sharply divided. There are those who see her as an authentic voice for traditional American values battling a culture that is trampling on those values on a daily basis. They see her as a victim of elite scorn and media mistreatment. Her detractors, including most Democrats and many independents, regard her as a political lightweight who is not fit to become the nominee of her party or president of the United States. Some Republican intellectuals see her that way as well.

That Palin is a force within the conservative movement is without question. In that way, some Republicans now see Palin as they saw Gingrich in the years leading up to his election as speaker - a rabble-rousing and often divisive figure who helped spark and energize a movement that eventually reached critical mass as a political force, though Gingrich has always been more comfortable in the battle of ideas than Palin appears to be.

A veteran of many Republican presidential campaigns now sees the huge crowds that turned out for Palin last year as the first stirrings of what have become the Tea Party protests. "She taps into that . . . stream of anger that folks feel so deeply, as Newt did in 1994," this GOP strategist said. "And, like Newt, she is a revolutionary figure to that crowd."

Palin demonstrated her influence among populist conservatives last month when she intervened in the special House election in New York's 23d Congressional District. Her decision to back Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman over Republican Dede Scozzafava elevated the race to national significance and put Palin on the side of the grassroots populist conservative movement.

That battle ended badly for the GOP. With Republicans badly split between Hoffman and Scozzafava, Democrat Bill Owens was elected to the long-held Republican seat. But the skirmish surely stamped Palin as a leader of the conservative forces inside the party.

The question is whether that is the limit of her influence, or whether she has the ability to fill out her political profile in a way that expands her appeal. Her profile now is grounded more in grievance and attitude than in positive ideas.

But there are political limits to that. Few Republican strategists now see her as a probable Republican nominee in 2012, and more and more of them are saying that publicly. The coming weeks will offer Palin the opportunity for a reintroduction and, as Gingrich put it so well, to show whether she has the capacity to grow politically.