Sarah Palin's surprise resignation last Friday has thrown one aspect of our culture into  dramatic relief: the unbridled arrogance of the pundit class. While it's fine to have an opinion about the way Palin orchestrated her resignation (and it seems just about everyone does) and though it's an irresistible parlor game to speculate about Palin's motivations and her future plans, the one thing that astonishes me is the string of pundits across the political spectrum proclaiming with certitude that Palin is out of the running for 2012.

Maybe she is. Maybe she's not.

We simply don't know what her prospects for 2012 are, nor do we know with any degree of certainty how the public - but most especially Republican primary voters - will react to Palin's announcement. And we definitely have no idea how they will react to things she may do in the future.

I suppose its human nature for pundits - who are supposed to be "experts" and have an opinion on everything under the sun - to make such declarations without having the faintest clue what the next 24 months might hold for Palin (or anyone else).

Even more to the point, pundits (and, yes, I regrettably include myself in this group) have time and again looked at the data and read the tea leaves and declared political outcomes with certainty, only to have voters turn around and decide things differently.

Barack Obama's presidential campaign is a perfect example of pundit arrogance.  It was a slow-motion, two-year "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment where almost the entire pundit class was spectacularly wrong from the beginning in declaring Hillary Clinton unbeatable and spent the rest of the time playing catch up to what was happening on the ground.

And we all remember what happened in New Hampshire.

The point is that politics, like life, is totally unpredictable. Pundits who say Sarah Palin has "no chance" or is now "written off" for 2012 are once again falling into the arrogance trap. They simply have no idea what Sarah Palin is going to decide to do. More to the point, if Palin does decide to run, pundits obviously have no idea how voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina might react to her two and a half years from now.