As a political journalist, you never forget the first time you stop just covering a politician and start identifying with her. The first time you wed your high-minded vision of what politics should be to a real candidate’s perishable breath.

My first time arrived in 2008. It lasted only a short while. Her name was Sarah Palin.

Let me explain. That spring, in between the Republican primary and the fall campaign, my friend Reihan Salam and I had published a book called “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.”

As the title suggests, we were calling for the G.O.P. to change, but not to moderate in the way that a lot of centrist pundits favored, returning to a Rockefeller-Republican model of fiscally prudent social liberalism. Rather, we thought the party’s opportunity (and the country’s) lay in a kind of socially conservative populism, 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.

Unfortunately this message conspicuously lacked a tribune in 2008. Mike Huckabee flirted with populism in the primary but never fleshed out an agenda, and the eventual nominee, John McCain, was an “honor and country” candidate who didn’t care much about economic policy.