Talk about nerve. The very notion of leaving an elected office occupied for barely two years. Even if it is to run for president, that makes it even more peculiar in view of the candidate's lightweight résumé of political experience.

I refer, of course, to Barack Obama.

Cheap stunt, but it makes my point. Sarah Palin's electoral track record, of course, is far longer than that of Obama, who overcame his meager credentials, and longer even than that of George W. Bush when he ran for president.

Granted, the departing Alaska governor's early political career is defined within the walls of a small-town city hall, but is that somehow less valid than years spent as baseball team co-owner or a community organizer?

The 2008 election redefined experience. As such, it is comical to read the sneering attacks launched toward Palin by hateful columnists who exalted Obama's decision to chuck his elected office and reach for the White House brass ring.

One difference is that Obama did it on the public dime, while still technically a U.S. senator. Palin at least has the decency to pursue her "higher calling" without the necessary long stretches away from her actual job.

So she leaves that job for a very uncertain future. Will she use this time to broaden herself, campaign for key people in 2010 and develop a strong foundation of voters that admires her as much for issues advocacy as spunk?

If so, she becomes a commodity to be reckoned with, a fact easily readable in the venom of her mocking detractors.

I was halfway through Todd Purdum's vicious Vanity Fair piece on Palin when I heard of her decision to step down. Among the first things I read afterward were the even more acrimonious New York Times columns by Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins, ridiculing that decision.

To Dowd, Palin is a "nutty puppy" displaying "exquisite battiness." She is merely "incoherent" to the similarly vexed Ms. Collins, who surely thought herself lucid when she found irony that someone against the "choice" to kill the unborn would focus on life's choices in her resignation announcement.

But in the stagnant Manhattan mindset, only people as glib as Dowd or as cavalier about human life as Collins deserve benefit of the doubt when approaching the presidency with slim political experience.

In Barack Obama they found their man. Just the proper hard-left instincts, just the right silver tongue. Their revulsion at Palin's un-Obama-ness is accentuated by the success she has enjoyed despite abandoning virtually everything the left requires of modern womanhood.

Now, her future is a blank slate, to be filled with her actual accomplishments. They had better be considerable.

The love of a loyal base takes a candidate only so far. She has to do more than delight the people who already adore her: She has to show doubters that she is indeed ready to be Barack Obama's successor.

That will require opposing his agenda with a vigor largely absent in most of today's Republicans. It will require campaigning skillfully for people who will try after 2010 to derail the nightmare of socialized health care, the punitive taxation of cap-and-trade and the sheer insanity of the spending binge launched on Inauguration Day.

If she succeeds, she may not silence the haters, but she will achieve an even loftier goal: proving them wrong.

That is a big "if." Her decision to step down creates instant pressure to perform. She seems to welcome it, but now we'll see if she is up to the self-created challenge.

If she is not, the clinging hopes of diehard fans will not help her.

But if she is, no amount of snotty condescension will keep her star from rising farther.