By Lisa Belkin, New York Times Magazine

Back before the Oprah interview and the resignation as governor of Alaska, before Tina Fey’s impersonation and the announcement of Bristol’s pregnancy, way back to the day John McCain named his running mate, Lisa Copeland was a Sarah Palin fan.

“When she gave her convention speech, I sat in my living room and wept,” says Copeland, a lifelong Republican and Texas native, who is a founder of a nonprofit group, the Project 19 Foundation, to move more women into political and professional leadership roles. “She was my age, she looks like me. I really thought she would save the party.”

But then Palin began to talk. “She embarrasses me,” Copeland says now. “She was uninformed; she did not do her homework. Do the men who run this country have so little regard for me?”

Notice how often Copeland uses the word “me.” You hear it a lot when women talk about Palin — it’s not just politics, it’s personal.

Selected to boost McCain’s support among women, Palin did exactly the opposite, with polls during last fall’s campaign showing that women were far less likely than men (by nearly 15 points) to describe her as qualified to be president. Now, as she powers through her 29-city tour with her recently published book, “Going Rogue: An American Life,” she still divides us, with less than a third of Americans saying that she is qualified to be president and less than half saying they view her “favorably.” Those who still love her, really love her — as evidenced by the Harry Potteresque lines at bookstores when she comes to visit. And those who don’t love her are embracing the fact that she is someone that they love to hate.

Sure, what many object to are her political stands — her belief that a teenager who is raped should carry the baby to term; her rejection of government bailout money — while others are troubled by her political games like riling crowds with accusations that her opponent was “palling around with terrorists” and leaving office suddenly, apparently to write her book.

But this is more than just politics. Conservative pundits like Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker questioned her, too — Noonan on a mike she didn’t know was live and Parker going so far as to suggest Palin leave the ticket. “Conservative men love her, liberal men dismiss her and move on,” says Betsy Reed, executive editor of The Nation and an editor of “Going Rouge: Sarah Palin — an American Nightmare,” a collection of essays examining Palin’s candidacy, “but she drives women crazy.”

That’s because this goes deeper than politics. If life is like high school, then today’s educated, ambitious women, on both sides of the aisle, are the student-council presidents and the members of the debate team — taught that if they work hard and sacrifice something along the way, their smarts will be rewarded.

This makes Sarah Palin the head cheerleader. (Though, in reality, she was the captain of the basketball team.) Pretty and popular, with no apparent interest in studying, she’s the one who industrious girls were tacitly promised would not succeed in the real world. Whether we voted for Hillary or not, we weren’t about to let Palin breeze in, with her sexy librarian hair and her peekaboo-toed shoes, conforming to every winking, air-brained stereotype, and sashay to the front of the line.

Which is not to say we didn’t like her for a moment. We were intrigued by this woman who could govern a state and raise five children and field-dress a moose; who seemed to do what the rest of us could not manage — to have it all. It was an uncomfortable moment, when liberal women found their personal worldview at odds with their political one. That there are so few women in political office right now (about 17 percent of the House and the Senate are women) means that each defeat seems like an opportunity lost, yet supporting this particular woman also felt like a step backward for feminism.

So there was relief when Palin couldn’t seem to link nouns and verbs when talking to Katie Couric. And when she really did seem to believe that living closer to Russia than to Oregon was foreign-policy experience. And when our suspicions that she was selected just because she was an attractive woman were reinforced by the fawning of the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who said she wasn’t “going to remind anybody of their ex-wife; she’s going to remind men ‘gee, I wish she was single.’ ”

True, our reasons to dislike her were in some ways as personal as the reasons to like her, but we justified our judging because she consistently makes her own politics so personal. “When she talks about the environment, it’s all about snowmobiles and hunting,” Reed says. “When she talks about health care, it’s about her baby, Trig.” (In fact it was her Facebook post mentioning Trig — “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ ” — that started all the uproar over what turned out to be a nonexistent part of the proposed health care legislation this summer.)

Still, once you boil down this brew of distaste and fascination, disappointment, ambivalence and justification, what’s left is (perhaps a bit too much) satisfaction. We feel pleased to see her fail. Because if she fails, then maybe the rules we were taught were more than just platitudes. Maybe that nose-to-the-grindstone, be-twice-as-good-as-a-man approach to life and work was not a naïve waste of our time. Sure, Palin gets not only Oprah, but Barbara Walters and the best-seller list. But she doesn’t get respect. And she doesn’t get the job.