Pub­lished by Cam­pus Progress

When rumors broke that Bris­tol Palin planned to attend Ari­zona State Uni­ver­sity, per­haps to major in com­mu­ni­ca­tions, I thought: Hmph.

Evi­dently her posi­tion as the high-profile daugh­ter of a celebrity politician—and a sin­gle mom/reality TV star to boot—doesn’t pre­clude her from liv­ing out the col­lege fan­tasy of every shel­tered, upper mid­dle class teen in Amer­ica: Attend a Playboy-ranked party school and major in some­thing utterly mean­ing­less. How refresh­ingly conventional!

But then ASU officials—apparently unhappy with all of the free press— had to go and burst my bub­ble by let­ting every­one know that the rumor was just a rumor: Bris­tol has nei­ther applied nor been admit­ted to Ari­zona State.

So then why exactly did she drop $172,000 cash on a chickenwire-and-stucco palace in the mid­dle of Mari­copa, Ariz.?

The­o­ries abound. Was Bristol’s deci­sion to pur­chase real estate in a des­o­late ham­let once deemed “the poster child for the hous­ing cri­sis” a shrewd invest­ment? Maybe—if she thinks errant tum­ble­weeds and long stretches of lonely high­way are worth over-paying for. Or maybe Bris­tolis actu­ally plan­ning to attend ASU and just hasn’t applied yet? It’s pos­si­ble since the appli­ca­tion dead­line isn’t until May. And after all, and Sarah Palin’s favorite gal pal, Jan Brewer, is on the school’s Board of Regents. Per­haps a mid­dling edu­ca­tion at the 143rd best under­grad­u­ate pro­gram in the coun­try is still within reach!

My absolute favorite the­ory, how­ever, is both the most out­landish and the most believ­able: A cou­ple of folks at the D.C. gos­sip blog, Won­kette, have argued that Bristol—ever her mother’s daughter—is relo­cat­ing to the bank­rupt sub­urb to fur­ther her hereto­fore unheard-of polit­i­cal ambitions:

Ari­zona will get a new, 9th Con­gres­sional Dis­trict thanks to the new cen­sus. Most observers think Mari­copa will end up smack-dab in the mid­dle of this new dis­trict. Bris­tol for Congress!

It sounds out­ra­geous, but it would cer­tainly explain (in part) why Rus­sell Pearce, another Palin pal, is try­ing to strong-arm Arizona’s redis­trict­ing com­mit­tee into let­ting him unlaw­fully choose its members.

Besides, I think that by now we’ve all learned that one ought never to under­es­ti­mate a Palin. Bris­tol may be young, inar­tic­u­late, and inca­pable of writ­ing her own (cul­tur­ally rel­e­vant) jokes but, like it or not, she has the mak­ings of a polit­i­cal powerhouse.

At 19, she began her own “lob­by­ing, pub­lic rela­tions, and polit­i­cal con­sult­ing” firm, BSMP, LLC—a fairly impres­sive feat even if she is, as Rachel Mad­dow reported, her only employee. (Cor­po­rate chi­canery? Check!) On top of that, she almost won Danc­ing with the Stars, in spite of hav­ing zero danc­ing expe­ri­ence and receiv­ing con­sis­tently low scores. If that’s not pol­i­tics, I don’t know what is. Plus she’s obvi­ously wealthy enough to drop $200,000 on a man­u­fac­tured home in a dusty shan­ty­town with­out bat­ting an eye­lash. Money opens all doors, even par­ti­cle­board doors lead­ing into a recently refur­bished Mari­copa City foreclosure.

But alleged polit­i­cal ambi­tions aside, Bristol’s recent real estate pur­chase is, at the very least, indica­tive of Arizona’s mete­oric rise to emi­nence among the Tea Party of which mother is a proud mem­ber. While the rest of the nation—and the world—turns up their noses at Arizona’s bel­liger­ent, “man­i­fest des­tiny” style of state gov­er­nance, Tea Par­ties are so increas­ingly impressed with the “Papers Please” state that their largest orga­ni­za­tion, the Tea Party Patri­ots, has cho­sen Phoenix as the site of it’s sec­ond anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion and first-ever “pol­icy summit.”

In addi­tion to vow­ing to sup­port Ari­zona dur­ing its “cur­rent polit­i­cal bat­tles,” the Tea Party Patri­ots describe its, at best, mediocre capi­tol as a “great south­west­ern city, born from the ruins of a for­mer civ­i­liza­tion.” Evi­dently, as Newsweek’s Ben Adler notes, “a liberal’s dusty, cul­tur­ally banal, reac­tionary dystopia is a conservative’s suc­cess­ful model of con­ser­v­a­tive ideals in practice.”

Per­haps Bristol’s implicit deci­sion to relo­cate to a recession-ravaged city in an eco­nom­i­cally defunct state maligned by much of soci­ety is a cal­cu­lated demon­stra­tion of her polit­i­cal con­vic­tions (and pos­si­bly ambi­tions). Or maybe this is just her small way of say­ing thank you to the crazed fanat­ics whose manip­u­la­tion of the DWTS vot­ing sys­tem nearly made her a star. Either way, she can cer­tainly rest assured that she’ll be among friends.

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