I’m not writing her off. No matter how many gaffes she makes, no matter what she writes on her palm, she is not going away.

In fact, she may very well be the Republican nominee in 2012, and if the economy hasn’t recovered by then, there’s an outside chance she could win the White House.

She is already the favorite among Republicans. A Newsmax-Zogby poll of January 28 had her garnering 22.2 percent of Republican voters, compared to Romney’s 19.4 percent, Gingrich’s 12 percent, Huckabee’s 11 percent, and David Petraeus’s 5.4 percent.

She was greeted as royalty at the Tea Party Convention in Tennessee on February 5.

And she articulates and echoes the anger that millions of people across the country are feeling at the giveaways to Wall Street.

“Too often when big government and big business get together and cronyism sets in, well, it benefits insiders, not everyday Americans,” she told the Tea Partiers in a line that resonated.

Barack Obama and many Democrats have been way too timid in going after big business. In fact, the coziness of Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke and Larry Summers with the Wall Street bankers has left Obama wide open for this kind of criticism.

A few Democratic populists have recognized this, most notably Marcy Kaptur, Dennis Kucinich, and Bernie Sanders, but Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod and Obama himself have been reluctant to embrace progressive populism.

Sanders has called for some of the Wall Street wheeler-dealers to go to jail, and Sarah Palin suggested the same thing on Saturday.

The bank bailout is killing Obama. All Obama could muster in his State of the Union was the comment, “If there's one thing that has unified Democrats and Republicans, it's that we all hated the bank bailout. I hated it. You hated it.”

But Obama voted for the bailout when he was a Senator, and then expanded it when he was President.

It is a cement block tied around his ankles.

And the only way to untie it would have been to push through a foreclosure moratorium or a jobs bill at the beginning of his Administration that was twice as big as the one he agreed to so that Americans could really feel that progressive policies could help them.

But at 9.7 percent or 10 percent unemployment, they can’t feel it.

One danger of Sarah Palin is that her remedy for the economic mess is nonsensical. She talked about a “a pro-market agenda” several times in her Tea Party speech, when it was just such an agenda that led to the deregulation of Wall Street and the collapse of the economy.

She said, “We’ve got to axe the plans for a second stimulus,” when that is the only thing that can keep unemployment from climbing back into double digits.

She, like most Republicans, is obsessed with the deficit and the debt, though they don’t mind $700 billion for the Pentagon and trillions of dollars wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She is disdainful of our legal system, even as she said in Tennessee that “the Constitution provides the best road map towards a more perfect union.” Like Dick Cheney, she faulted Obama for affording Abdul Mutallab the protections of our legal system, mocking the President for letting the Christmas bomber be “lawyered up.”

She promises a return to the lawlessness of the Bush-Cheney Administration, sneering that “we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law.”

Some of Sarah Palin’s base is made up of Cheneyites. And some of it is made up Tea Party people, who don’t see the government helping them and feel desperate to change that.

People are looking for answers. And Sarah Palin is providing them. They are simplistic answers. They are foolish answers. They are the wrong answers.

But they have an appeal.

And so does she.

To dismiss her would be a terrible blunder.

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine. To subscribe for just $14.97 a year, just click here.