There are a lot of good conservatives out there. Yes. But the situation is that the choice among conservatives is Palin or one-of-the-others. For Republicans generally it is either Palin or Romney. The Democrats will vote for Romney and there will be a lot of them voting in the Republican primaries. The only viable alternative to Palin for Conservatives will be someone who comes on so strong in the next year that he is well beyond where Palin is now. That is not a realistic expectation and the last one to come up quickly was Goldwater. Reagan was not a shooting star. He plodded away making the necessary connections and planting his markers for 8 years at least before he became The One and even that was a near thing at the Convention. And he didn’t have to contend with massive Democrat voting in the Republican primaries. Palin faces that unless Soetoro has serious opposition from the Clintons.
People forget that Reagan spend YEARS preparing himself for the job. By the time he was a candidate he was an expert on both domestic and foreign policy.