Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake have an interesting argument for why Mitt Romney should want the Sage of Wasilla to fully enter the contest for the Republican presidential nomination. It’s reasonable (and I recommend reading it), but ultimately I think it’s wrong. Romney should be rooting for Palin to take a 15-month cruise or something like that. Her candidacy most likely wouldn’t help him — and could hurt him

Cillizza and Blake’s argument is mainly focused on the prospect that a Palin candidacy could split the Tea Party vote in the primaries among her, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, while Romney could walk away with the rest of the GOP electorate, which would be scared of a Palin victory. It’s certainly possible that their scenario could happen. However, I’d back up and think about the contest a bit differently.

From a party perspective, what matters are two things: Will Perry be seen as a solid candidate who can unite the party and run a good race against Barack Obama in the fall? And will solid conservative party actors be willing to accept Romney? If Romney can’t get their support, or at least avoid their veto, then his campaign is ultimately going nowhere. The GOP is highly unlikely to nominate someone whom moderates like and conservatives won’t tolerate. Meanwhile, we still need to see whether Perry is going to be a very strong candidate. All we know now is that he appears to be a plausible nominee and that his rollout was successful. But how he plays with various party actors is still somewhat unknown.

The thing is, the rest of the field — those candidates who aren’t going to win — doesn’t have much to do with how any of those questions get answered.

Meanwhile, Palin running creates a fair number of risks for both Perry and Romney. The first is that based on her record, she certainly cannot be trusted to be a loyal party soldier. We don’t know how that might play out in the actual campaign, but if I were running the winning candidate’s campaign I wouldn’t want a candidate around who is known to hold grudges and act on them, and who has shown little respect for party norms and interests. Moreover, since Palin is massively unpopular with the general electorate, having her in the news constantly would remind people why they don’t like Republicans very much these days. The nominee will eventually eclipse her. . . but if she is able to rally her supporters enough to win a fair number of delegates, she could easily create all sorts of unwanted distractions all summer and through the Republican convention. Granted, there’s a risk of that happening anyway, but it surely would be worse if she became a real candidate and the press has that excuse to swarm to her.

As far as Romney is concerned, the bottom line is that to win the nomination, he’s going to have to beat Perry one on one (assuming the contest plays out the way it looks now). If he can’t do that, he’s not going to be nominated. End of story.

Oh, and one more thing about Palin. The only real reason that she’s not a plausible nominee even now is because she still hasn’t shown that she is willing and able to do the things that nominees do. If it turns out that she is capable – of retail campaigning and working the activists and party leaders outside of her core supporters, and reciting talking points well enough to sound as though she knows the issues — well, it’s unlikely, but she might have a shot at winning. I can’t quite picture her suddenly doing those things. But if she did, I can certainly imagine the press talking about how she’s grown and matured, and a lot of conservatives who have soured on her suddenly remembering what it was that they liked back in 2008. And you know what? If I were Mitt Romney, I wouldn’t want to take even that slender chance.