Many are scoffing and clucking at Sarah Palin recent announcement that she is resigning as governor of Alaska at the end of the month. Either the pundits can’t figure out  why she’s doing what she doing or they’re saying what a political catastrophe it is for her.

I will take the contrarian view and say I think I understand what she’s trying to do. She’s running for President in 2012. After meeting with several top GOP politicos when she was in Washington last, including Bush I aide Fred Malek, they must have told her she cannot be governor of Alaska and run for President at the same time. So she took their advice and decided to vacate the office and made the decision to do so right away.

Now while the decision is unusual and her detractors have a point that when voters elect you they do so presumably for the full term in office, Palin can reply back that she wishes to run for the White House fulltime and was not going to let state business suffer because she traveling around the country. And she can also ask messrs. Romney, Pawlenty and Huckabee how often did they do their jobs or were around  in their offices in the last months or years of their final terms as governor while they were running for President? She can also point out that Jimmy Carter spent his last years as governor of Georgia (1971-75) traveling the country on behalf of Democratic candidates and wasn’t around Atlanta all that much either. She simply chose not engage in a charade nor did she wish to be continually harassed by her enemies in Alaska. These are not unfathomable reasons for leaving her post early. Unconventional yes, but not unfathomable and it may be all this sound and fury now will be forgotten in a few years.

I will grant you her recent public utterances have been less than coherent to say the least (“higher calling?” Are you joining a convent?) Perhaps in this two and half year period she has to get ready to run for the White House she can invest the time to find literate speech writers for example, to give her words to speak that voters can follow. One would also hope she spends this time traveling the world, brushing up on public policy and perhaps finding a rational for her campaign beyond the obvious ethnic, racial and gender symbolism. If she does not do these things, she will be exposed in debates and by the media as an empty skirt and will be crushed at the polls and deservedly so. This is her last chance.

However, simply leaving the governor’s office does not solve her logistics problem of campaigning from the White House from Alaska. Perhaps before 2012 she may move somewhere in the lower 48 to better position her campaign. Why not Evansville, Indiana, right in the country’s heartland where she was warmly received the last time she visited?