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Sarah Palin became a demure Alaskan belle for a brief moment this morning, telling Barbara Walters that she just wants to play a meaningful role in American national life “if people will have me.”

And running for President in 2012? “Not on my radar screen right now,” she told Walters on “Good Morning America.”

As with Oprah Winfrey yesterday, Palin played the schoolgirl waiting by the phone when it comes to her future. Why, she hardly has any plans at all, she suggested, but so many wonderful opportunities have popped up in her life that gosh, nothing would surprise her. She could be asked to play point guard for the Lakers. She could be asked to run for President. Who knows?

Her interview with Walters, which is running in multiple parts, was in many ways a condensed and thus improved version of her hour with Oprah Winfrey yesterday.


She also made it clear she has as little use for David Letterman as she does for Katie Couric, saying she wouldn’t want to appear on his show, but is happy if he keeps talking about her because that may sell more copies of “Going Rogue,” her new memoir.

As with anyone promoting a book, however, Palin already was going into reruns on the second day of the tour.

She’s clearly not planning to say anything specific about her political future, and she’s already outlined in the book her resentment of how she was “handled” during the 2008 presidential campaign and how she feels the media abused her family.

“Bullcrap” was the term she used this morning to describe many of the things written about her family, and while Walters later said that term took her aback, she added that Palin’s fans love what they see as her blunt language and straightforward style.

That language and style may become blunter, and even more satisfying to her supporters, when she finishes her obligatory visits to “liberal media” people like Walters and Oprah and chats with Sean Hannity, who loves her the way Oprah loves Michelle Obama.

Palin clearly isn’t ready to unconditionally forgive the media she feels has mistreated her. When she speaks at a college in Missouri next month, the media will be banned.

Her interview with Walters this morning was professional – although, like the interview with Oprah yesterday, it had less political than celebrity content. That’s a fact Palin herself seemed to lament when she said she sometimes feels her life “has become a reality show.”

In some areas, however, the celebrity factor works in her favor. When Walters noted that some McCain staffers have dismissed her accounts of 2008 campaign “handling” as fiction, it played less as a news controversy than as a minor footnote to the fact that “GMA” had landed Palin to talk in person.

If Palin Week is generating relatively little news, however, this could have several benefits for her. First, she could sell books. Second, her face is everywhere. Third, and more subtly, her modest “if the people want me” approach could help blunt any suggestions that she is an ambitious opportunist greedily reaching for something she’s not qualified to do.

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When the Republican vice presidential candidate could not name for Katie Couric which magazines or papers she regularly read that informed her worldview, it fueled the perception among voters that she was not ready for national office.

In an interview with Barbara Walters, Palin set the record straight.

"I read anything and everything that I can get my hands on as I have since I was a little girl," Palin told Walters. So what books and newspapers currently top her reading list?

"I'm reading the best book right now -- Dean Karnazes's book about being an ultra-marathoner. I read a lot of C.S. Lewis when I want some divine inspiration...I read Newsmax and The Wall Street Journal. I read all of our local papers of course in Alaska because that's where my heart is," Palin said.

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