The list of “don’ts” for rising political stars is long and varied. You’re not supposed to offer Thanksgiving greetings before a group of turkeys meeting a noisy end. You’re not supposed to quit your job as governor before finishing three years in office. You’re not supposed to use Facebook as your primary tool of communicating with the public. You’re not supposed to get into public back-and-forth spats with late-night-comedy-show hosts. You’re not supposed to jump into obscure upstate New York congressional races and lend your support to a struggling third-party candidate.

Sarah Palin keeps breaking the rules. Her detractors claim she’s setting a once-promising political future afire, turning herself into a bizarre, polarizing, controversy-driven reality-show star and a laughingstock amongst serious political thinkers. Her supporters claim she’s outfoxing her critics at every step, offering a clear, sharp voice of common sense that the heartland has been yearning for, and biding her time for an eventual near-certain campaign for high office.

Clearly, Palin is not the best-positioned candidate for the Republicans in 2012; the unfinished term in Alaska leaves her with a short and incomplete demonstration of her ability to manage a government. But those who see her as reduced to a recurring punch line are ignoring the fact that Palin is breaking another rule, the one that says you have to be in elected office to influence the political world. Any event she attends instantly sells out and is guaranteed massive media coverage. She reset the terms of debate in the health-care fight with the phrase “death panels.” We can put a dollar amount on what Sarah’s blessing is worth to a little-known candidate: In the first 24 hours after her endorsement, Doug Hoffman’s congressional campaign in upstate New York took in $116,000, mostly in small donations. What’s more, Palin set off a stampede of additional endorsements and attention for Hoffman.

And now her book is dominating the political news cycle like few others in recent memory — perhaps matched only by the Clintons’ volumes or by Colin Powell’s. She has had a much-touted Oprah appearance and front-page coverage in major newspapers, and her book tour seems likely to attract huge crowds.

What does the future hold for Sarah Palin? The question was put to four smart GOP consultants, all of whom have worked on winning campaigns; some of them worked closely with the McCain 2008 effort, some did not.

Consultant A is a supreme skeptic: “If she didn’t come with the drama of Levi, the intellectual vacuousness of the Couric-Gibson interviews, the message of teen pregnancy, the track record of a job half done, and the price tag of tens of thousands of RNC dollars’ worth of clothes, then maybe she would have a chance of elective office again.” He adds: “Will she be a kingmaker? I suppose there is a certain strain of conservative that responds to her, and somebody needs to fill the void left by Mike Huckabee, Gary Bauer, and Alan Keyes. However, if Sarah Palin is trying to sell me on who to support, I’m probably going to keep shopping around.”

Consultant B, who was close to the Hoffman campaign, observes, “She clearly has a following within what I will call the ‘nonaligned conservative movement.’ I don’t include in this group all the Tea Party folks or the 9/12-ers, though many of them do fall into this mix. And her biggest influence, I think, may be in GOP primaries, if she supports real conservatives who can win. That will require some sound political judgment and the building of a team to vet, recruit, and support those candidates. It’s not clear to me that she has that in place yet.”

B also notes that her preferred candidates have to be ready for the aftershocks of Palin-mania: “Given that she also creates great energy on the left, candidates she supports will have to be ready for the onslaught that will almost certainly ensue from her involvement in a race. That is why a focus on the primary races may be the way for her to have the most influence in shaping the party — on a local and state and federal level — and helping conservatives.”

Consultant C believes Palin will be remembered as one of the most influential conservatives outside elected office: “Palin will forever be a cult hero among conservatives, but I think it is unlikely she will ever hold public office again. In fact, I have concluded that she will never even run. In 20 years she will have earned a spot on the mountain with Buckley, Goldwater, and Limbaugh, but I don’t see her on a ballot again.”

Consultant D, meanwhile, thinks a 2012 run could be in the cards, and he has mixed feelings about it: “Unlike a lot of GOP consultants, I am not thoroughly convinced that she won’t run for president. I think she very well could. If she does, I think winning the nomination will be very, very tough, and I think it is inconceivable that she could win a general election. But Palin does a lot of things that seem crazy or inadvisable to a lot of people, and I don’t think you can rule out that she might at least explore the possibility of running for President. . . . There is a lot of chatter about her serving in a kingmaker role in future, and I think that’s where she likely enables herself to exercise most influence.”

There’s something worth remembering about all these political rules that Palin seems to relish breaking. Some of the rules are obvious — if you aspire to a national office with a four-year term, it’s good to finish a four-year term in statewide office — but others just represent a challenge no one has met before. Lots of political figures now have Facebook pages, and any one of them could have decided to make it his or her main platform for communicating with supporters before Palin did.

Consciously or not, Palin is acting as a one-woman experiment, determining how many rules of political life are really enforceable. Sometimes the experiments will go poorly — Palin’s comments on Oprah suggest that she wishes her disagreements with Levi Johnston, the father of her grandson, could have been handled privately — but she has managed to create an environment where her every word or appearance is still considered newsworthy, three and a half months after she left office.

And it’s worth remembering that while the odds of Palin’s winning the presidency look long, they’ve looked longer for others. Picture yourself walking the blustery streets of Chicago in the early spring of 2004 and watching a campaign rally. Some obscure Illinois state senator with a name that sounds like a cross between a Middle Eastern dictator and a character from The Lion King is hoping to win the Senate primary. You watch him, you decide he can give a good speech and has an interesting life story, but you conclude that he has a very modest résumé of legislative accomplishment. You’re told that in four and a half years the skinny guy in front of you will be president of the United States, after beating John Edwards and the Clinton machine and John McCain, and that he will carry Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. You would be screaming “That’s impossible!” even before you were told he did this with the handicap of Joe Biden on the ticket.

So we can look at Sarah Palin, multimedia goddess, and conclude it’s impossible that some future chapter of her life’s story will feature her in the White House. The rules wouldn’t allow it.

But life has demonstrated that these rules are ironclad until the day they’re broken, and suddenly they shrivel to the status of outdated conventional wisdom.

–– Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot for NRO.