Harry Truman gave them hell. Sarah Palin gives them agita.

The Associated Press unleashed 11 fact checkers on her new book, Going Rogue, for a thoroughly tendentious critical examination. Newsweek, the influential liberal magazine of opinion, published a cover piece damning her to the outer darkness, balanced by another piece damning her to the further-outer darkness. The conservative-leaning New York Times columnist David Brooks called her “a joke.”

It’s September 2008 all over again. All the same players are lining up to put a good hate on Sarah Palin. She’s like an isotope designed to course throughout our politics and culture, lighting up press bias, self-congratulatory liberalism, Christianity-hating secularism, and intellectual condescension wherever they are found.

The contempt of her enemies only increases the ardor of her fans. Palin is the most divisive woman in America, supplanting a Hillary Clinton who is losing her electric political charge as Barack Obama’s mostly irrelevant secretary of state. First, Palin divided Democrats and Republicans. Then she divided the conservative commentariat. Finally, she divided the McCain campaign itself, which devolved into an ugly internal war over its vice-presidential nominee.

Palin takes her title from a McCain aide’s description of her refusal to abide by every tittle of the campaign script. The most entertaining parts of her breezy, readable book are when she takes up the long knives herself and plunges them into the McCain aides she believes mishandled her, or trashed her anonymously after the campaign.

Major political candidates don’t typically name and shame staff in their memoirs, but Palin is doing it under extreme provocation. The “Was Sarah mishandled?” debate will endure as long as anyone cares about the 2008 campaign. Almost every particular is disputed by someone or other in the McCain camp. It’s fair to say this: Yes, the campaign had a hugely difficult task in taking Palin from 0 to 60 mph on the national stage, but it handled it badly — and, in the end, gracelessly.

Palin has lived to tell the tale because going rogue is now her operating principle. Her base of support is so intense, she doesn’t need supply lines into the political or media establishment. She transformed her Facebook page into a must-read organ of conservative opinion by lobbing “I can’t believe she said that” rhetorical bombshells. No political consultant would ever approve of her M.O.; for Palin’s purposes, no political consultant could possibly improve on it.

Palin is as much a cultural phenomenon as a political one. If that’s a strength, it’s also a drag. It’s not easy for a cultural lightning rod to win the White House. Just ask Hillary.

Political detox is possible, of course. Richard Nixon wasn’t the red-hunting vice-presidential candidate of 1952 when he ran for president in 1968; Bob Dole wasn’t the partisan hatchet man of his 1976 vice-presidential campaign when he took on Bill Clinton 20 years later; Jerry Brown won’t be the New Age “governor moonbeam” of 1974 when he runs for governor of California again next year. These transformations were the work of decades, though, and Palin no longer occupies the Alaska governorship, where — prior to her national ascension — she governed as a center-right pragmatist.

But why should Palin change? She represents less a philosophical strain on the right than an affect and a demographic. What makes her otherwise orthodox conservatism different is the plain-spoken, combative way she expresses it and the constituency she attracts. Her supporters identify with her populist, unaffected vibe and tend to be disaffected with politics as usual — they’re Palin Perotistas. A drastic image makeover would only drive them away.

Republicans need these voters more than ever given the roiling grass-roots revolt against Obama’s governance. Without them, they can’t get a majority; they’d be doomed if they were ever to slide into a splinter party. If Palin is their voice and channels their energy productively, she’s part of the Republican answer to Obama, no matter what presidential politics ultimately holds for her. There’s an upside to rogue.

(c) 2009 by King Features Syndicate