According to Politico, Sarah Palin remains super duper popular (STILL!), almost as popular as the President Elect, and isn’t that crazy??

“People are still searching for her in record numbers,” said Kathy O’Reilly, a spokeswoman for Lycos. “How bizarre is that? Obama is the president-elect after the most historic election of all time and you’d think he would be dominating search activity and he only now is going ahead of her.”

There’s no doubt Sarah Palin is an unnaturally engaging public figure, but so much of the attention she draws is of the car wreck rubbernecking variety; people aren’t tuning in to hear sober assessments of the delicate future of our resilient country, they’re hitting Lycos out of a morbid curiosity to see what sort of terrible things may happen to America’s number one most hilarious political circus.

And no need to go much further than the Politico article itself for evidence of the morbidity:

  • Sarah Palin was the most popular Lycos search item from early Sept until this past week, when she was ultimately overthrown by…Paris Hilton (a woman known less for being an active mom of a mentally disabled kid than she is for being a mentally disabled kid who many millions have seen partaking in some mom-making activities).

 
Or, as Politico insists, observe Sarah Palin’s smash-success YouTube videos, consisting entirely of:

 
Sarah Palin certainly has “a unique opportunity to build up something massive,” as one Republican operative puts it. But I have a hunch that massive something will be more along the lines of a popular daytime talk show on Fox News afternoons than anything else.