Sarah Palin: Boldly Not Running for President Since July 3, 2009

So: Talibunny puts out a stroke job that would get her banned from Chatroulette and shunned by Christine O’Donnell, and the lamestream media responds like a litter of Cubby Grizzlies in a suckling frenzy.

We understand that Will She Or Won’t She has a practical consequence for her potential primary opponents: If you’re gaming a race, you can’t count her out until she definitively rules herself out. You also have to prepare for the possibility that she sucks all the money out of the room. If we were a political consultant, it would be dereliction of duty to arbitrarily remove her from the board.

But we are, instead, merely a Humble Citizen of These United States, and we think the chatter about her running is, and has long been, utter bullshit.

Sarah Palin is not running for President. She is building her fortune. And doing quite well at it.

What confuses people is that her fortune is based on her brand. Or, these days, brands — an enterprise that began a generation ago with Sarah Barracuda, incorporated more recently under SarahPAC, and has picked up Rogue and Mama Grizzly along the way.

Really, she’s the Walt Disney of politics: The Wonderful World of Sarah Palin, now rolling out in a reality series near you.

None of this would preclude her from running for President, of course, and most of it would probably help. But to run — and lose, as she inevitably would, not just against Obama, but in more than one primary — would damage the brand.

Really: What could she possibly say after losing a string of Southern states to Huckabee? “I am not a quitter”?

Of course, she wouldn’t have to. Each of her opponents would find the most delicate but effective way to say it for her.

As long as Sarah Palin doesn’t have to face that reality, she can ride the Maybe Wave for years, and cash in on endorsements. Just ask Newt: He’s not running either, and never will, but the merest hint that he might is enough to rack up sales of his next doorstop. That’s just the currency of the trade.

So back to Wednesday’s offering of autoerotic self-hagiography, which even Potter Stewart would recognize on sight: It’s been noted that all the generic shots are (of course) stock photography, and everyone has jumped on the revelation that the “sunrise” behind the Statue of Liberty is really a sunset played backwards.

Which leaves us to observe one bit of Reagan iconography that everyone else overlooked:

America, there’s a bear in the woods.