I grow to dislike her more and more every day. I can remember when I knew who she was WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY before anybody had taken any notice of her (I called it that John McCain would pick her for his veep candidate about a week after it became clear he was the nominee and my family still act like I have some kind of secret sources or something that keeps me up-to-date with the inner working of the Republican Party, lol) and I loved her a lot. She was clearly not the sharpest tool in the shed, but very open-minded and also intellectually curious and questioning in a way that almost no major politician is.
The problem is that her genuine search for real, non-ideological solutions - the approach she took before entering the national limelight - has given way to a sense of her "intuition"... as if solutions just occur to her, and she's so brilliant that they're naturally right. I really think that Republican establishment types have taken her curiosity and distrust of authority and used it as an excuse to fill her head with all kinds of nonsense:
"Oh, yeah, you totally shouldn't trust that information... it's clearly just an authoritarian trying to hoodwink you!"
"Oh, you wondered about that? Well, tell us what you think, but we think the best solution is [whatever]"
etc. etc.
She's simply not good at separating the wheat from the chaff in any ideological or philosophical debate, so as long as something sounds like "outside the beltway" logic, it must be good! If she had kept to her pre-national-debut approach of delving deeply into the issues and really learning them, she'd be great. But she's turned to the easier path of assuming that her "political instincts" are her greatest asset, which has just made her easier to control.
That's my two cents, anyway, and I'm kind of tired so I'm thinking it just came across as rambling and incoherent. Kind of appropriate for a Palin thread, though, so I hope everyone will forgive me.