It was a measure of something — doubts about the actual prospects for a McCain victory, or disappointment with the current alternatives in the Republican party — but in the days following the close of the Republican convention in Minneapolis, a few souls began looking forward to the 2012 presidential contest and to Sarah Palin’s possible headlining role in it. After Palin’s convention speech, more than a few conservative Republicans and self-professed centrist Democrats ignored John McCain’s own words and convinced themselves that if elected, he would only serve a single term, thus laying the groundwork for Palin to run outright in 2012.

Conservatives, of course, looked forward to the possibility of running one of their own — an opportunity the primaries had denied them — while unreconstructed Hillary supporters envisioned the triumphant return of their favored candidate. Internet domain names like “palinforpresident.com,” “palin2012,” and “sarahpalin2012” quickly disappeared into the speculative vortex.

With the McCain ticket facing a likely defeat next Tuesday, the “Palin 2012” conversation has now begun in earnest. Much of this has been prompted by Palin’s increasingly frequent “rogue” moments, which have evidently inspired an ugly rift within the McCain campaign. At The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder argued last week that Palin had already begun “play[ing] the Republican base against John McCain” by griping about the campaign’s abandonment of Michigan, by wondering aloud about the decision to avoid the subject of Jeremiah Wright, and by whipping crowds into spastic furies with talk of Obama’s “terrorist” pals.

On Monday, Palin wandered off-script again and spent several minutes dismissing the controversy over her wardrobe, thus assuring that the story would remain in the news cycle for another day. Many observers, including Ambinder, have wondered if Palin is not, in fact, distancing herself from McCain to gain early traction for a future run at the White House.

Most of the chatter about Sarah Palin’s political future rests on the optimistic premise that Palin, as a presidential candidate, would at last be capable of energizing social conservatives while drawing independent voters in ways that she’s been unable to do as a vice presidential pick. This tableau further assumes that Palin, having taken four years to mature as a national candidate, would carry none of the baggage she’s accumulated — quite literally — over the past two months. Barring a massive swing in the nation’s political climate, Palin will likely be a worse candidate in 2012 than she is at the moment.

Whatever else might be said about Palin’s nomination, her effect on the entire race has been unprecedented. Discovered on Wikipedia by a college student, promoted by lovestruck conservative men, and yanked onto the national ticket by John McCain in a moment of historic desperation, Sarah Palin was judged a superstar and party heiress apparent before she’d uttered a single unteleprompted word.

It was an odd spectacle, rendered even more bizarre by subsequent events, most of which — her seclusion from the media, her famously inelegant conversations with Charles Gibson and Katie Couric, her talk-radio demeanor at campaign rallies, and the conclusion of the “Troopergate” investigation — barely need mentioning.

While Palin entered the national stage as an alleged bi-partisan reformer who “governed from the center,” she has served on the campaign trail mainly as a courier of raw meat to an infuriated base, which has responded favorably to her insinuations that Barack Obama consorts with “terrorists,” harbors socialist economic beliefs and cares less about America than her running mate.

While these tactics have helped secure the loyalty of hardcore Republicans, Palin’s presence on the party ticket has arguably redounded to the advantage of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Nationwide, public opinion of Sarah Palin has soured noticeably. According to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll (October 21), one out of three registered voters has a “very negative” impression of the Alaska governor, a figure that has doubled since mid-September. More than of the survey respondents expressed the view that Palin was unqualified to serve as president if the circumstances required it. There is a strong likelihood that Sarah Palin is nudging voters away from John McCain.

Widespread doubts about Sarah Palin’s suitability for high office have not been confined to ordinary observers. The conservative punditocracy has divided itself over Sarah Palin, with high-profile doubts expressed by George Will, Kathleen Parker, Peggy Noonan and David Brooks, among others. Overt defectors to the ranks of Obama voters have included conservatives like Christopher Buckley and Ken Adelman as well as moderate Republicans like Colin Powell, all of whom have cited Palin as one of their primary reasons for rejecting the McCain ticket.

And now, with mere days left in the campaign, Republican leaders like Tom Ridge and Lindsey Graham are openly speculating that a different VP pick — Joe Lieberman or Ridge himself — would have done more to further Republican hopes of retaining the White House.

Palin, however, was the product of a more Rovian calculus, which insists that securing the party’s core is more important than courting independents. For precisely these reasons, Karl Rove himself allegedly pushed McCain to select Mitt Romney as his running mate. When McCain selected the Alaska governor, “Bush’s Brain” cheerfully predicted that Palin could add a durable, three-point swing in McCain’s direction.

At this point, Karl Rove appears to have been grossly mistaken, as he was in 2006 when he boasted that “The Math” would add up to continued Republican control of Congress. But the selection of Palin was wrong only to the degree that it failed to impress independents; as a base-magnet, she has been effective. As a candidate in 2012, she would enjoy what conservative activist Brent Bozell promises would be a “small mother lode” of financial support. Marc Ambinder argues that such levels of support, combined with the likelihood that Republicans will have been completely dispossessed of power in Washington, would allow Palin to run “the most anti-government, anti-Washington campaign this side of Barry Goldwater.” Given the fate of Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964, that’s an analogy that should make Obama supporters especially optimistic.

In the meantime, of course, Palin will have to deal with a potentially rough homecoming in Alaska. The political fallout from the Branchflower Report on troopergate has yet to fully materialize, and the results of a second investigation, by the state’s personnel board, have yet to be released. State legislators from both parties were less than thrilled with Palin’s conduct on the campaign trail, where she allowed McCain officials to disparage the bipartisan investigation as an unprincipled hatchet job, and there are plenty of Alaskans who objected to Palin’s characterization of Walt Monegan as a “rogue” commissioner who undermined the governor’s agenda while failing to show an interest in protecting her family from an “out of control” state trooper.

Recent disclosures about Palin’s use of state funds to pay for her family’s travel, or per diem claims she submitted to sleep in her own home, may continue to haunt Palin during the last two years of her term. At this point, there’s no reason to assume she won’t cruise to re-election in 2010, but it’s also possible that the national campaign will turn Palin into the sort of polarizing figure that’s ill-suited for success in Alaskan state politics. Recast in a hyper-partisan role for national political consumption, Palin will have a difficult time resuming her earlier posture as a pragmatic, bipartisan executive.

Looking ahead, there seems little doubt that Palin’s 2008 message will be irrelevant in four years, by which point the chants of “drill, baby, drill” should sound even more beside the point than they do at the moment. And unless Bill Ayers receives a cabinet appointment in the Obama administration, Palin’s major talking points will have long since abandoned her. Even the term “maverick” will likely go down with the ship, and an entirely new marketing campaign will have to be constructed on Palin’s behalf. And if Joe the Plumber receives a tax cut over the next four years, there will be almost nothing for Sarah Palin to do in 2012 but smile and wink.

That, of course, might be enough for the weird men who write for The Weekly Standard, but for the rest of us — Tina Fey excepted — it will hardly be worth the time.