A surprising thing is taking place as Sarah Palin starts speaking out on the issues in recent speeches, internet postings, and in the book tour she is now undertaking for her memoir “Going Rogue.” An outline is starting to appear in respect of the substance of her world view — call it “Palinism” — and it is far more substantive than her detractors suggest or than we gained a glimpse of during the campaign. She has been, in a straightforward way, stepping up on certain issues that her fellow Republicans would do well to emulate.

This started to come into view for us when she gave her interview to Barbara Walters and was asked what she thought of Israel’s West Bank settlements. “I disagree with the Obama administration on that,” Palin replied. “I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

Her comments ignited something of a kerfuffle on the pro-Israel left, which has long opposed Israel’s settlements. But the formulation by the former Alaska governor struck us as a wonderful statement of an emerging policy. It provides a glimpse of a leader who would respect Israel’s right to establish, democratically, its own strategy in its own sphere and could restore the standing of America’s president in the eyes in the Israelis, among whom it has plunged since President Obama’s speech in Cairo and his out-reach to the non-democratic Arab leaders.

These columns had already perked up to Mrs. Palin’s position in respect of the dollar. This came out in her speech in Hong Kong and in a posting on her Facebook page, where, in sharp contradistinction to other figures in both parties, she warned about the collapse in the value of the greenback, which has now plunged well below a thousandth of an ounce of gold. While the liberal elites mock the former governor of Alaska, Mrs. Palin herself appears to be one of the few leaders who grasp the catastrophe of a weak-dollar policy.

In any event, Mrs. Palin also emerged as sure of foot on the subject of jobs. This struck us during her interview with Greta Van Sustern of Fox News, when she was asked about the 15% unemployment rate among returning veterans. The governor went straight to taxes, saying “job opportunities are going to be created when our federal government will quit taxing those who are creating the jobs, not quit taxing but reduce the taxes, [and] start incentivizing, small business especially, so that this economy can become more robust. We’ll see jobs created, not government doing the creation of it, but the private sector.”

That is not the riff of a lightweight but of someone who has thought about and studied the relationship between high tax rates and high unemployment. This goes all the way back to the Great Depression. The governor went on to describe as “nonsense to most Americans” the idea of a second, trillion-dollar “stimulus” program, which the Democrats are talking about. Instead, she spoke of the need to reduce capital gains taxes, taxes on corporations and small businesses, and on income so that people and companies can do their own prioritizing.

It happens that as we were writing this editorial we had an email from a long-time reader of the Sun who had recently heard Mrs. Palin compared to the young Margaret Thatcher. The comparison was, our correspondent wrote, made by the former editor of the National Review, John O’Sullivan, who was part of the Thatcher brain trust and knows her well. Mr. O’Sullivan compared Sarah Palin “not with the Margaret Thatcher that we all have heard of, but with the emerging Margaret Thatcher” whose “sophistication and ability to articulate issues” were still being honed. And our reader’s impression was that he reckoned Mrs. Palin is more of a “political natural” than her British counterpart.

This newspaper greeted Senator McCain’s choice of Mrs. Palin as a running mate with an editorial that ran under the headline “A Brilliant Pick.” Aside from her display of a deeply held commitment to certain basic principles, she turns out to share with Ronald Reagan a quality that will stand her in good stead for years to come — people keep underestimating her. It is an opposite quality to Mr. Obama, who has been credited with a lot more savvy than he has, at least so far, displayed. It puts Mrs. Palin right where she wants to be as she positions herself for the substantive debate that will be needed to bring our country back.