Sarah Palin resigns

Sarah Palin's resigned as governor of Alaska. My guess: someone was getting too close to a real scandal. There's been a lot of charges of her abusing her position to cover up things or help her friends. Most of those were dismissed due to evidence not being there or no cooperation from witnesses. It's possible someone was getting close to some real evidence that those charges were really valid and someone connected to Palin scuttled the investigation somehow. With her out of office, there'll be a lot less pressure to dig deep into that. And then she's had some weirdness in her personal life, especially with her daughter and grandkids. There could be another personal scandal brewing that someone was getting wind of. If she's out of office it'll be a lot easier to let that blow over without it making national headlines. In both cases, by the time it's time to start a Presidential campaign for 2012 all the scandals will be old news and it's much easier to deal with old news and a hiatus from political life than it is to deal with a live records of "just one thing after another".

Either that or she's decided that she just can't face the constant digging into her personal and professional life that goes along with a political career these days and is quitting politics entirely. Up until her vice-presidential candidacy she's had mostly to deal with local politics in a state where even state-wide politics more resembles small-town politics than anything else. It's entirely possible she simply had no clue what getting into national politics would entail, and once she'd gotten some experience with it just decided she wanted no part of this.