“Colonel Allen West, who’s been to the school of hard knocks, he should be the one considered seriously for VP.”

Ann Coulter seems to think there’s something to fear about a brokered convention. I don’t get it—that, or the notion that Sarah Palin is pushing for a brokered convention so that she’ll be nominated. Palin is not going to be in the running at a brokered convention, she knows it, and she’s said she knows it.

Palin said clearly that she understood “I’m not going to be asked”. The only thing she’s said that’s remotely close was when she said “I would do whatever I could to help” if there were a brokered convention. That takes a lot of work to read as “I want the nomination”. It’s a lot easier to read as that she’d do what she did during the 2010 elections to help conservatives get elected.

But given that in the immediately previous sentence she said that lots of others would “offer themselves up in the name of service to their country” and that she’s gone out of her way to praise all four of the candidates and even suggest people other than her for the slots (such as Allan West for the VP slot), it takes a pretty twisted reading to read that as her asking to be nominated.

But one of the other things Palin said about a brokered convention—in the same sentence as “I’m not going to be asked”—was that “if it results in a brokered convention, that is nothing to fear”.

And it isn’t something to fear, unless you’re President Obama or a member of the biased media. A brokered convention would be a godsend to a smart Republican party. Conservatives have two chances of getting their voices heard during the presidential election without it being chopped into pieces first by a biased media: the debates and the convention. The only one where they can frame the discussion is the convention, because the debates always seem to involve crazy questions like George Stephanopoulos’s out-of-the-blue contraception question. The convention is fully under the control of the Republican Party.

The only problem is that by the time the convention rolls around everyone knows who the nominee is and it’s normally a pretty boring affair. A brokered convention, on the other hand—that’s exciting. The media would be forced to cover it, and they’d be forced to cover it live. It would be up to the Republican Party to choose the questions and the process for choosing their nominee. A smart Republican Party would use that to frame the rest of the election.

Perhaps Palin has more faith in the Republican Party than it deserves.