Sarah Resartus: Tailoring Palin for the future.(SPECIAL POST-ELECTION ISSUE)(vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin)(Viewpoint essay)

THESE are the things that can be said, with some degree of certainty, about the candidacy of Sarah Palin for vice president of the United States. First, that picking her as his running mate was the only thing John McCain did all year that shifted, however temporarily, an unfavorable electoral landscape to his favor. Second, that she gave one of the most successful debut speeches of any candidate for national office in American history, followed by one of the most disastrous prime-time interviews. Third, that the Gibson/Couric debacles, the broader hostility to her candidacy among the chattering classes, and the style in which she campaigned for McCain combined to gradually push her unfavorable numbers up toward levels that took Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich years to achieve. Fourth, that she leaves the campaign trail with the affection--even adoration--of many on the right, but lacking the crossover appeal she'll need if she aspires to run for national office again.

Those are the knowns; the list of unknowns is considerably longer. Start with the big question: Did she ultimately help McCain or hurt him? Crunch one set of numbers--her high unfavorables, the polls showing a majority of Americans doubting her readiness to assume the presidency--and it seems that she almost certainly hurt him. But the majority of voters who cited Palin as a major factor in their decision voted for McCain, according to the exit polls, suggesting that she may have turned out more Mac-skeptic Republicans than she turned off independents.

And about those anti-Palin swing voters: Were they turned off mainly by Palin's perceived inexperience and policy fumblings, or did they buy into the media's narrative of the Alaska governor as a redneck Spiro Agnew, George Wallace in a dress? The McCain campaign reinforced this narrative by using Palin primarily as an attack dog and as a saleswoman for arguments McCain himself was too proud to make. How much of that was Palin's doing, and how much of it reflected the folly of her handlers? This is what's at issue, for instance, in the post-election feud about whether her famous reference to Barack Obama's habit of "palling around with terrorists" was delivered on her own initiative or on orders from HQ.

All of this goes to the deeper question: Who is Sarah Palin, and what might she become now that she's no longer tied to McCain's campaign and message? Is she the center-Right pragmatist who racked up 80 percent approval ratings while governing Alaska or the polarizing red-meatslinger who's been embraced by the GOP's activist base? What does she really think about immigration or the bailout, to pick two issues that just might come up in a future Republican primary campaign? And is she capable of reclaiming ownership of her image from her enemies in the press and from her conservative hagiographers alike?

How Palin answers these questions will, I suspect, depend in large part on the psychological impact of the purgatorio she endured during her two months on McCain's ticket. In the heady days after the Republican convention, I remarked in these pages that the Alaska governor might be "the first conservative ever to benefit from a full-scale Borking and to emerge from the media gauntlet stronger than when she entered it." That was premature, alas: The assault on Palin may have crested with the great Bristol brouhaha, but it continued apace throughout the campaign--and even now that their candidate has cruised to victory, the media still seem eager to circulate almost any nasty anti-Palin rumor or slander, no matter how implausible or thinly sourced.

Given this grueling, disillusioning experience, no one would blame Palin if she allowed her next political action to be informed primarily by the grievances she's accumulated during this go-round. If the media have treated her as an enemy to be destroyed, then why shouldn't she do the same to them? If the conservative base loves her while the N.Y./D.C. elite harbors doubts, then why shouldn't she rally the base against the ...