So Sarah Palin is, like, ready to run for president in 2012 if, like, it is something that is going to be good for ... no, wait: Let's have her tell us, shall we?

"I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door," she told Fox News this week. "And if there is an open door in '12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door."

Now, I'm not one who trashed Palin during the past two months, beyond mentioning her disturbing performance in the Katie Couric interview and her lack of knowledge of foreign policy. She may have been unprepared for the vice presidency, but the man who will actually take the job in January, Joe Biden, is an embarrassment in his own right -- even if many journalists and stand-up comics were determined to give him a pass.

Unfortunately, Palin's latest interviews provide fresh evidence for why Republicans should think twice before conceding front-runner status to her next time. To put it bluntly, at times she comes across as something of a chirpy lightweight -- meaning the political left and entertainment media would continue to have a field day with her.

By contrast, it's hard to imagine anyone seriously questioning the intellectual heft of, say, Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana who is frequently mentioned as another possible candidate. A graduate with honors from Brown and a Rhodes scholar, Jindal is both smarter and better educated than most of the liberals who regularly equate conservatives with dolts.

Oh, some would undoubtedly try to ridicule Jindal for an article he wrote in 1994 describing an exorcism he said he witnessed as an undergraduate a few years earlier. But mocking someone's religious beliefs is notoriously risky, as is holding someone responsible for what he thought or did as a youth.

To be sure, Republicans are used to their presidential candidates being portrayed as simpletons by America's intellectual class. Eisenhower was savaged for his alleged indifference to ideas ("the bland leading the bland," was the sneer), while Ford, Reagan and both Bushes were widely decried as incurious ciphers.

Politics being what it is, such attacks can't always be avoided. But that hardly means a party should actively invite them -- as Republicans would if they resort to Palin again.

Nothing like '29

Barack Obama's inauguration is likely to surpass anything we've seen in our lifetime, as hordes of Americans descend on Washington, D.C., to witness history in the making.

Will its emotional impact equal that of FDR's first inaugural, which Frances Perkins said resembled a revival meeting? Will it match Andrew Jackson's populist celebration, which attracted jubilant citizens from hundreds of miles away?

Jackson is probably the better comparison because his election, like Obama's, represented a democratic watershed. It was the "triumph of the common man" -- many voted directly for president for the first time -- and farmers, laborers and frontiersmen flocked to the capital that day.

They "really seem to think that the country has been rescued from some dreadful danger," sniffed Daniel Webster upon observing the popular mood.

Unlike today, a president in 1829 did not have unlimited security at his disposal. Jackson was mobbed while making his way from the Capitol to the White House, only to be mobbed again in his new home.

A witness to the events wrote that "those who got in [the White House] could not get out by the door again, but had to scramble out of windows. At one time, the president who had retreated and retreated until he was pressed against the wall could only be secured by a number of gentleman forming around him and making a kind of barrier of their own bodies, and the pressure was so great that Col. Bomford who was one said that at one time he was afraid they should have been pushed down, or on the president."

Jackson ultimately fled to the security of a Washington hotel, while drunkards trashed the White House art and china.

Come January, the scenes from Washington are likely to be a lot more uplifting. If nothing else, our manners seem to have improved in 180 years.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.