Totally agree. I was a candidate myself last year, briefly, and went through the sticker shock of what it takes to feed those folks. No wonder so many people get sucked into obligations other than their electoral constituency, and thus so often fall short of their duty to represent those who voted for them.
It's also one of the best arguments for why Palin really is running despite being grossly misunderstood by "industry professionals." She's bypassing those "professionals" with malice aforethought. She's using her grassroots support, the people who will actually vote for her, precisely because that way she remains free to fulfill her duty to represent them and always do the right thing ... for them. She's living her platform.
In fact, she made comments in one of the books that would have shed light on this to open-minded persons, but it has been widely overlooked due to the industry bias. I believe she was in the car with her family, not long into her term, and she commented that to get any sleep at night as politician, you'd have to be either corrupt or rich. She was just a hockey mom, and now she was for the first time seeing just how bad the political process had become.
BTW, that right there should give a clue why she has forged a unique combination of high income activity with candidate-like activity. That is a combination so off-template to the industry regulars it's creating mass confusion among them. Those who cannot think outside the current, corrupt process can only see the high income activity and the lack of genuflecting to industry “overlords” as an indication of insincerity, hence the pervasive belief within the industry she’s not really running.
But those of us without those expectations of "standard candidate behavior" are having a much easier time reading her as running, because the signal is clearly there, if you can get outside the box.