What Sarah Palin must do next

(Telegraph)....I recently had a conversation with Jim Nuzzo, a Republican strategist and consultant who worked as a senior policy adviser in the first Bush White House. He was the first Republican I came across who was touting Mrs Palin's credentials as a running mate for John McCain.

Mr Nuzzo is a fan of Mrs Palin and genuinely believes she can reinvent herself as the new Margaret Thatcher, or a female Ronald Reagan, depending on your preference. But he thinks she now needs to hunker down and get out of the public eye and prepare for a dramatic and persuasive relaunch in the year before the next election.

Here's what he said when I spoke to him a week ago:

"She needs to be enough in public and elite opinion so she doesn‘t fall off the radar screen entirely but she also has to step back and allow Obama his time on the stage and not get worn out herself, not become a figure that the public gets bored of.
"The second thing is to get together with a number of experts and basically do the heavy lifting of learning all the minutiae of what Washington government is all about, with the idea that she produces a book of her ideas in three years time.
"Most presidential candidates do that. It's critical for her. She has to have a book that says: ‘These are the problems of America and this is how we solve them.' And they have to be intellectually sound enough and deep enough that people will give her a second look, while maintaining her no nonsense personal approach to politics. She has to be slightly off the stage to do that."

Mr Nuzzo is keen to stress that this does not mean Mrs Palin should take tutelage from the wise old McCain campaign sages who filled her head with nonsense during the election campaign. And he stresses that she has been the victim of both sexism and class based prejudice. But he added:

"She's got to be that much smarter and that much more in tune than her rivals. What is clear is that she is very bright and a very quick study. In a short period of time a set of advisers can get her to the stage where she is thinking creatively about the solutions to the nation's problems.
"The McCain campaign came in and treated her like an idiot and demanded that she memorise and regurgitate.
"What she needs are people who recognise that she is a brilliant woman and want to give her understanding, which is completely different from giving her a set of facts. She doesn't need someone who is going to hand her an atlas and say: ‘Memorise every capital city and spit it back at me.' What she needs is someone who is willing to work with her so she develops her own understanding of these things, that it becomes Sarah Palin's ideas, owned by Sarah Palin. It requires someone who respects Sarah Palin's intelligence."

Some of these ideas have already been offered by Newt Gingrich, who told The Hill recently that Mrs Palin could become "very formidable" in the coming years as long as she "seeks out a group of sophisticated policy advisers".