You remember Sarah Palin — who in September 2008 was unveiled as the secret weapon which John McCain would use to shed his Washington insider sheen, connect with ordinary Americans, and beat Obama and Biden. The Palin surge didn’t last long, as she encountered hostile, skilled reporters in long, painful interview after interview. Her answers to Katie Couric were so famously stilted that one week the writers on Saturday Night Live simply threw up their hands, admitted they couldn’t improve on them, and had Tina Fey simply deliver what Palin had actually said, verbatim.

Arguably, the Republican leadership treated Gov. Palin callously, cynically digging her up out of relative obscurity and throwing her into the arena — then quickly washing their hands of her, with some Republicans openly disowning her during the campaign itself. That haughtiness rankled Palin, who went on to reinvent herself as a spokesman for the purist, small-government and socially conservative Tea Party movement, making a series of endorsements that sometimes helped fledgling candidates, such as Ted Cruz in Texas. Palin made a down-home virtue out of the revulsion she provoked among “elites,” including many articulate conservatives.

Analyzing Palin in The New York Times, Ross Douthat noted that in 2008 he had advocated a kind of populist approach for the GOP. “We thought the party’s opportunity (and the country’s) lay in a kind of socially conservative populism,” he said, “which would link the family-values language of the religious right to an economic agenda more favorable to the working class than what the Republicans usually had offered.”

When Palin was picked by McCain’s staff as a sop to the Huckabee wing of the GOP, Douthat was briefly hopeful. “She was pro-life, evangelical, a working mom,” he said. “And her record way up north was reformist in a distinctly nonideological way: She was best known for fighting a corrupt nexus of politicians and the oil-and-gas industry, tackling crony capitalism on behalf of ordinary Alaskans.”

Douthat defended Palin for as long as it was possible, before finally concluding that Palin was a spokesman for a different sort of populism than he’d had in mind. Over time, Palin’s substantive core of beliefs has become less clear, and her political involvement has seemed more driven by gut instinct, group identification, and personal ambition. Those are three of the core qualities you could use to define political “populism” of the sort that fuels Donald Trump’s run. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that Palin rejected the principle-driven, constitutionally restrained Senator Ted Cruz and embraced Donald Trump instead. Douthat observed:

A lot of conservatives, especially in Ted Cruz’s orbit, have acted shocked or disappointed that Palin would endorse a figure like Trump, who has no plausible claim to be a principled conservative.

But given Palin’s Alaskan past, the endorsement makes perfect sense. Her real roots are not in Reaganism or libertarianism or the orthodoxies of the donor class. They’re in the same kind of blue-collar, Jacksonian, “who’s looking out for you?” populism that has carried Trump to the top of the Republican polls.

Ted Cruz was wisely gracious in his response to Palin’s decision, reverting to his primary strategy of trying to beat Donald Trump by winning his supporters away, instead of rebuking and shaming them — as other Republican candidates have tried to do, with zero success.

I love @SarahPalinUSA Without her support, I wouldn’t be in the Senate. Regardless of what she does in 2016, I will always be a big fan.

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) January 19, 2016

Tea Party activist and commentator Erick Erickson suggests that Palin’s endorsement of Trump won’t make much difference in Iowa, but might matter in the long run:

Sarah Palin gives Trump legitimacy. She is a former Republican governor and vice presidential nominee endorsing the front runner few take seriously just as so few took her seriously. Right now, every campaign and editorialist in America is piling on Ted Cruz. Palin is not an endorsement to get new people to vote for Trump. She is an endorsement to get Ted Cruz’s voters to go to Trump after Iowa….

The other thing the Palin endorsement does is draw a clearer line between conservatives and reactionaries on the right. Cruz is now running as the principled conservative and Trump as the reactionary conservative. Sarah Palin has long spoken up for that part of the party and this expands Trump’s bona fides.

Ironically, Palin’s endorsement comes at the very moment that some “Establishment” Republicans — members of the very group that wrote Palin off as a gross embarrassment — are rallying to Trump’s candidacy, as the last hope of stopping the anti-establishment Ted Cruz from capturing the nomination. The New York Times reports:

Bob Dole, the former Kansas senator and 1996 Republican presidential nominee, has never been fond of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. But in an interview Wednesday, Mr. Dole said that the party would suffer “cataclysmic” and “wholesale losses” if Mr. Cruz were the nominee, and that Donald J. Trump would fare better….

But Mr. Dole, 92, said he thought Mr. Trump could “probably work with Congress, because he’s, you know, he’s got the right personality and he’s kind of a deal-maker.”

To this Cruz’s supporters were quick to respond that Dole had issued a similar warning in 1980 about a candidate he considered outside the mainstream: Ronald Reagan.