JOE McGINNISS

It’s tough to catch lightning in a bottle.

Equally tough to recapture the sound of thunder once someone else has spirited it away.

Sarah Palin’s endless, erratic dithering about her 2012 intentions has created a vacuum on the evangelical right that Michelle Bachmann has been quick to fill.

Who was all over the Sunday talk shows today? Bachmann. Suddenly, the press is all about her.

Just look at this.

Through her fear of engagement with America’s opinion-makers, and movers and shakers, Sarah has painted herself into a corner at which fewer and fewer people even bother to glance.

Bachmann has effortlessly slid into the groove that Sarah once occupied.

Suddenly, it’s Bachmann who is the “serious” female candidate for the GOP nomination.

Suddenly–or not so suddenly–Sarah has been shoved to the sidelines, from which her shrill cries can barely be heard.

I start the last chapter of THE ROGUE by writing:

The time has come to strike the tent.

That may seem like a strange thing to say in the last chapter of a book about the star performer of the circus. But no matter how much my book sales might benefit from a Palin presidential campaign in 2012, I sincerely hope that the whole extravaganza, which has been unblushingly underwritten by a mainstream media willing to gamble the nation’a future in exchange for the cheap thrill of watching a clown in high heels on a flying trapeze, is nearing the end of its run.

Someone who knows Sarah better than I do told me recently that the only thing that would propel her into the 2012 race would be a credible Michelle Bachmann candidacy. Because Sarah couldn’t bear to yield the limelight to another woman.

Yet it’s happened. I’d always thought Sarah would run for president because to not do so would destroy her credibility even among the cretins who would have supported her.

But she just didn’t have the guts, or the commitment, to do so. She’s always been a phony and a bully.

Because of John McCain’s desperate and deeply unpatriotic inanity, she got in over her head in 2008.

She’s been treading water ever since. Now she’s about to sink out of sight.

To switch the metaphor back to the circus, she’s skulked away from the center ring, conceding it to Bachmann without a fight.

A venal, lying, avaricious quitter she always was, and a venal, lying and avaricious quitter she’ll always be.

Goodbye, Sarah, “The Oft-Defeated.” We knew ye all too well.