After several wondrous hours in the Chugach foothills with my mixed collie, Coya, I arrived home Friday evening to a message from my sweetheart, Helene, for now living in Oregon. “Hey,” she said, “I just heard that Sarah resigned. What’s going on up there?”

Good question. This is the second time that Helene has been the first to share a Sarah bombshell with me. The first was when John McCain named Palin as his running mate. That time, Helene shrieked into the phone. This time her message was subdued, in a quizzical sort of way. That’s what Sarah Palin has become to many of us, I think: a quirky curiosity who is hard to take seriously. Last summer, Helene was deeply worried that Palin’s charisma might fool the public into thinking she’d be a strong VP. It did, for a while. But her weaknesses – and, I would argue, her superficiality and hate mongering – eventually did her in, along with any chances John McCain (admittedly already a long shot) had of winning the presidency.

Though I did applaud Palin when she took on Alaska’s Republican core (way back in 2003, when she battled party chair Randy Ruedrich, while both served on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission), I strongly opposed her run for governor, largely because of her extreme views on wildlife management and predator control and stances on environmental issues. And I have never been especially impressed by her leadership. I was disgusted by her “pit bull with lipstick” shenanigans during the presidential campaign and have found her explanations for many state policy decisions to be hypocritical or nonsensical and also self-serving, from her opposition to the endangered listing of polar bears to the Troopergate fiasco and her rejection of federal stimulus money for energy cost relief. Though all of the ethics complaints against her have so far been dismissed, I also believe this self-righteous reformer has her own ethical blind spots.

Once again, in her “resignation” speech, Palin makes little or no sense. As others have already pointed out, there is no reason she has to be a “lame duck” governor with 16 months left in her term. If worried that the decision to not seek a second term would diminish her ability to govern, she could have simply kept that intention to herself. In fact this former “Sarah Barracuda” has, by all appearances, quit on the state and the people who elected her. It’s true she may have good reasons to resign, and those may eventually be revealed, but for now she has given us nothing but gobbledygook.

Palin’s Fourth of July Eve announcement – why at the start of the holiday weekend? – would seem to confirm my own belief, shared by many others who’ve grown weary of her style: that since becoming a national celebrity and a darling of the so-called religious right, she has lost her enthusiasm for governing Alaska. She’s become a disinterested leader. If true – and the evidence continues to mount – then that is the saddest part of Sarah’s legacy. Unless she has substantial personal reasons, beyond ambition, for abandoning her post, our soon-to-be ex-governor will rightfully be branded as a quitter.