Frum thinks she may have put party second:
Palin’s self-immolation today may yet do the Republican party more harm than good. Had Palin sought and won the Republican nomination in 2012, she would almost certainly have proceeded to a Goldwater-style debacle – and dragged Republican senators, governors and representatives down with her. That would have been a miserable result. And yet it also would have been a clarifying one. Republicans would have got Palin and Palinism out of their systems in a sharp and painful lesson that would have opened the way to the kind of reconstruction that has occurred in, say, the United Kingdom.
She is a poison pill – always has been. But I suspect that David is right – the current GOP will not recover until it absorbs the full scale of this insane pick for veep, and the subsequent refusal to take responsibility for it – and even celebrate it.