"I leave you gentleman now and you will write it. You will interpret it. That's your right. But as I leave you I want you to know — just think how much you're going to be missing. You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference and it will be one in which I have welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you."
-- Richard Nixon, November 7, 1962
There he stood, humbled and jobless, having unexpectedly lost his bid for Governor of California. Just two years earlier as vice president, Nixon had lost in one of the closest presidential elections in history. He was humiliated that August when President Eisenhower, in a televised press conference, couldn't give an example of a major idea of Nixon's that he had heeded. "If you give me a week, I might think of one," Eisenhower said. "I don't remember."
There was no reason to think Nixon's public life was anything but over. He moved to New York City and became a partner in the law firm of Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, and Alexander, where he argued a major libel case before the Supreme Court.
But he also wrote a bestselling memoir, Six Crises, which reviewed the major events in his public life from the Alger Hiss scandal through Khrushchev and Caracas to the 1960 campaign. He penned articles on foreign policy for magazines and journals. And he fundraised and campaigned relentlessly for Republican candidates across the country.
And by 1968, the laughing-stock of 1960 and 1962 was seen as the leader of his party-in-exile, a Serious Thinker for serious times. As he wrote in his memoir, "I have never regretted what I said in 'the last press conference.' I believe that it gave the media a warning that I would not sit back and take whatever biased coverage was dished out to me. I think the episode was partially responsible for the much fairer treatment I received from the press during the next few years. From that point of view alone, it was worth it."
I think you see where this is going.
There are many in our party, and in the DailyKos community, who believe that Gov. Sarah Palin is finished in public life, that she has been humiliated, disgraced and permanently retired to an ice floe off the Pribilof Islands for a long, quiet life of snowmobile races and muktuk dinners. I am not among them.
The media loves a comeback story, as will her die-hard band of loyalists. So after some time outside the public eye, expect Palin's memoir to come out in the next year or two, with appearances on all the major news magazine shows and daytime chat shows. She'll call up Hannity and Limbaugh when she gets bored, and even Hugh Hewitt when she's really bored.
Palin will be the most in-demand GOP fundraiser in the country, and will begin to build her own network of contacts and supporters in all the key states.
And she will gain over time the one thing she was missing this cycle, and it isn't "experience" but what experience is often a proxy for -- mastery. What Gov. Palin needs to do if she is to return to national politics is to find ways to convince people that she knows what she's talking about, and this can be done. She can develop her own views on the role of government and America's role in the world. She should become a voracious reader -- I'd start her out with The Economist -- every week, cover to cover, including the special reports on corporate social responsibility and the new nomadism -- as well as my smart friends over at The Next Right.
And in 2015 (if not sooner), I'd predict, we'll see a new Sarah Palin criss-crossing the early primary states, with a few more lines in her face and perhaps a Bonnie Raitt streak of grey in her hair at the age of 51 -- a reformer with results from the Last Frontier -- and we will need to take her very, very seriously.
Or to take another example: the losing candidate for Vice President in 1920 lacked experience, but gained much respect as an energetic campaigner for his party's ticket, especially in the West, where he railed against the large sums of money being spent by the other party in the election. Still, his party failed to win outside the South, and the Electoral College was a rout. After the election he returned to his home state, built up quite a record as Governor, gave rousing speeches at his party's conventions, and in 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to his first of four terms as President of the United States.
Yes, my friends, we will have Sarah Palin to kick around once more, and she will be formidable. Mark my words.
[I am deeply indebted to Rick Perlstein's Nixonland for inspiring this.]