Presidential candidates and beauty pageant contestants share a subsurface competitiveness that smolders right underneath the "Hail Fellow Well Met and Right Back Atcha; " exteriors.  Both aspirants deploy strategies that would make a five star general proud all the while seeming innocent and charming. Beauty Queens may indeed want to save the world but they want to run it first.

The biggest mistake the GOP will make is to dismiss Sarah Palin.  Here's why:  Sarah doesn't need the GOP to win in 2012 but they need her to win.  If Sarah can't get the support of the party, she will just go off the reservation and become perhaps the first third party candidate to win in the history of the United States.  She has tons of advantages now that the incumbents don't have now:

1. Book Deals and Speeches: Bill Clinton made some 45 million dollars in speaking fees and book deals after he left office.  Palin can do the same thing, confess all her sins, and make whatever someone doesn't like old news by the time they get around to writing about it again.

2. Collaboration :  Palin gets to build a coalition around her platforms in the public and non public arenas and she is guaranteed to have 100% press coverage on anything she does.  Since, as a media person you do not want to be the last one at the Palin Press Conference in Boise at 7:30 in the evening on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, you will take seven flights, two cab rides and stay at the Red Roof Inn to make the announcement which will be nothing more than a speech on why pumpkin pie is an American Tradition.. 

3. Consensus building:- If this woman loses all her friends, she will make new ones to replace them.  Beneath that smile is a fierce competitor who knows that in war, friends as well as enemies go by the wayside.  She'll make amends later on. 

4. No Second Place- Second place in Sarah's mind is the first loser whether it be in a beauty pageant or presidential race.  She got a first hand feel and taste for being the 'token' white woman on the ticket and what ' staying on script' means in the 2008 Presidential Campaign..  This woman has a much chance of staying on someone else's script as a Rottweiller does sitting still in a steak factory.   She will never take orders from anyone in the GOP again, especially the old gray haired males.  If you don't understand how all this works, watch the Discovery Channel.  It will be pretty clear that the females really run the pride. The males are just hunters and sperm donors. In the end they just get old and gray and toothless.

5. The Incumbents go Defensive: Sarah will draw the incumbents out over the next three and a half years like the true guerilla she is.  Beneath that tapioca exterior lies the heart of a true fighter and if you tangle with her, just make sure 911 is close by.  She'll be speaking to you and as she walks away you will feel a small trickle of warm fluid flowing down your front.  It will be blood from where she's cut your throat. You won't even feel it.

6.  Being the Woman's President:  The world gets more conservative as it gets older.  Family values, the rights of children, the sanctity of life and marriage, are all things that "glass ceiling" women are coming round to as they age.  Sarah is the right age at the right time to provide a focal point to middle age women and their daughters.

I don't know that I'll vote for her if she runs but I do know that I will be watching her as she does to see if she's just one half as smart politically as I think she is.