Sarah Palin endorsed 60 candidates this year, but when dust settled Wednesday morning, the biggest beneficiary of the “Sarah Palin effect” was not necessarily the candidates themselves, but the Palin brand. 
 
 Of the 34 candidates Palin endorsed for the House, only 15 won, a less-than-stellar average for someone vying to be the difference-maker in Republican politics. 
 
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 She did endorse one giant killer, Vicky Hartzler, who took down veteran Democrat and House Armed Services Chairman Committee Ike Skelton of Missouri. Michael Grimm, who took out New York Democrat Michael McMahon, gave Palin another marquee win. But on the Senate side, only five of her 12 choices were successful – with the most embarrassing stumble potentially being her home-state pick of Joe Miller, who is knotted with Palin foe Lisa Murkowski in a tight battle that could end in a weeks-long recount. 
 
 GOP strategists and observers, however, emphasize that Palin didn’t necessarily choose whom to support based on electability – rather, she backed candidates who aligned with her philosophically. In doing so, she continued to boost the brand that has made her a star among conservatives and raised her name identification with everyone else, regardless of the final scorecard. 
 
 “I think the process has done enough,” said Ed Rollins, Republican campaign consultant and former chairman of Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign. “She's got the most valuable asset anybody can have in politics, and that's name ID — she has negatives, sure, because she's such a polarizing figure — but among the grassroots, the people who will vote in primaries, she's a star.” 
 
 Rollins likened Palin’s 2010 push to Richard Nixon’s campaign swing across the country in 1966, when Nixon positioned himself for another presidential run in 1968 after his loss to John F. Kennedy by stumping for congressional candidates nationwide, helping to lift the GOP to a 47-seat gain. 
 
 “No one remembers who won or lost, only that he was out there,” Rollins said. 
 
 Palin has gone beyond just putting herself “out there,” though. Other potential GOP 2012 presidential hopefuls have hit the trail hard, including Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, but none have drawn the sort of attention and media craze as Palin. Among Republican campaign observers, many believe only Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, has done better building goodwill for himself this cycle with an eye toward the next. 
 
 And though Tuesday’s tally — 27 victories, 15 losses and eight undecided races in all, following 10 primary losses — did not make a clearer case for a Palin presidential run, her supporters feel excited about what her involvement has done to conservative candidates across the country and what she could do in two years. 
 
 Many point to Palin's decision not to surround herself with a deep professional staff as one of the reasons she deserves the credit for her outsized influence, but also an explanation as to why she didn't enjoy a higher success rate Tuesday. Palin seems to have been the architect of many of her own decisions — which some say earns her more loyalty from her chosen candidates but also affected her win total. 
 
 Perhaps no two races were more symbolic of Palin's mixed efforts to take down prominent progressives than her candidates’ success in taking down a 30-year veteran like Skelton, and her failure in Massachusetts, where Sean Bielat fell significantly short of knocking off House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank. 
 
 In Senate contests, she supported Rand Paul, Pat Toomey and John Boozman; but she also backed Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and John Raese. ||||| Once, there was a different Sarah Palin. 
 
 She was hands-on and averse to partisan politics. She championed openness in government and had normal relations with the media. She was a little starstruck by her interactions with national politicians but unafraid to do battle with the chief executives of the world’s largest oil companies. 
 
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 The emails from her governorship, released Friday, brought back the memory of a long-lost Palin: the popular, charismatic, competent woman of the people. 
 
 This was the vice presidential candidate John McCain’s team thought they were getting, before her darker tendencies — defensiveness, thin skin, grudge-keeping — hardened into tics. Together with the newly released, pro-Palin documentary “The Undefeated,” which focuses on her rise to the spotlight, the emails are reminders of a sympathetic figure who was not yet the brittle, divisive caricature Palin has become. 
 
 The Palin that emerges from the first cut at nearly 25,000 emails released by the state of Alaska Friday is touchingly authentic, responding to the news she’s been tapped for the national ticket with the words, “Can you flippinbelieveit?!” 
 
 She comes across as practical and not doctrinaire, as when she explains at length to an aide, early in her term, why she opposes a bear hunt in a wildlife preserve: “I am a hunter. I grew up hunting — some of my best memories growing up are of hunting with my dad to help feel (sic) our freezer… I want Alaskans to have access to wildlife… BUT — he’s asking if I support hunting the bears in the sanctuary? No, I don’ t … Many Alaskan and Outside visitors view these animals on the McNeil river, within the sanctuary, and, as my parents have reported back after their viewing trip, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see such beauty on that river.” 
 
 Far from being a knee-jerk partisan, she praises then-Sen. Barack Obama for his energy ideas — “pretty cool,” even though he is the “wrong candidate.” She derides the Republican establishment just weeks before being picked for the ticket, writing, “we need to remember the GOP, for the most part … especially the AK machine … has not had any support or assistance provided our administration so our time and efforts will continue to be spent on serving Alaskans, not party politics.” 
 
 If critics were hoping to see Palin revealed as a hypocrite, they’re out of luck. Her private statements are in line with her public ones when it comes to issues like Troopergate, the ethics scandal in which she was accused of abusing her authority to punish her sister’s ex-husband. Her emails on the matter fulminate against what she insists are false accusations, maintaining the same consistent defense — that Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan was fired for performance, not personal, reasons. 
 
 Palin comes across as neither an airhead nor a prima donna. She is warm and supportive with her staff, who are loyal to her in turn. She frequently misspells in haste or phonetically (“nonsensicle” for “nonsensical”), but her writing is fluent and grammatical. 
 
 Nor is she a figurehead. She is active in guiding policy, a self-assured politician who knows where she stands. When she feels she’s been left out of the loop on responding to a disaster, she’s adamant — “someone from Homeland Security/Emergency Management needs to call me and inform me on things like this … I insist on being informed during any situation where the public would feel any person could be in danger.”
– Sarah Palin is looking like one of the biggest non-Democratic losers in the midterm elections, according to some analysts. High-profile losses among the candidates she endorsed, especially in Alaska, where Lisa Murkowski appears bound for victory as a write-in candidate, are likely to undermine her credibility, the Economist notes. It predicts that we'll be hearing less from Palin—at least until she makes her 2012 ambitions clear—as the spotlight turns to rising stars who have actually been elected, like Rand Paul and Marc Rubio. GOP strategists, however, say that while Palin's "Mama Grizzlies" may not have been big winners, the Palin brand definitely came out ahead. "She's got the most valuable asset anybody can have in politics, and that's name ID," Republican campaign consultant Ed Rollins tells Politico, comparing Palin's efforts in 2010 to Richard Nixon's campaigning on behalf of GOP candidates in 1966 ahead of his successful bid for the White House in 1968 . "No one remembers who won or lost, only that he was out there," Rollins says.