“Should I be worried?” asked Oprah Winfrey of Sarah Palin. It was her final question. In truth, it was the only question I wanted an answer to –the only reason I watched the full hour “Oprah Winfrey Show” launch of Sarah Palin’s book tour on behalf of her memoir, “Going Rogue” (HarperCollins, 432 pages, $28.99).

No, what Oprah was worried about was NOT whether Palin was going to run for president in 2012. She already had asked her that question, in so many words. And not only had Palin said it’s not on her “radar” at the moment, she shook her head decisively at Oprah after America’s hostess with the mostest announced they were going to commercial.

Exact-a-mundo. Jackpot. The Palin question to end all Palin questions. And, in my view, the true upshot of her book’s surefire ascendancy to monarchy over best-seller lists for quite a long while. What Oprah wanted to know as Palin goes on a very select tour to sell the bejabbers out of her book (the entire city of New York was disinvited) was simple: Is Sarah Palin going to have her own talk show?

I’m among those who never thought she had a chance of getting within a mooseburger’s distance from a 2012 Republican ticket.

It’s a higher office than the presidency, after all, that is truly open to Sarah Palin, and Oprah is shrewd enough to know it: Palin could turn into the Oprah of the right. (Oprah Winfrey, after all, doesn’t need to be president. She can appoint them –or at least launch them into a ruling position in the Infosphere.)

Palin could be the right-wing woman closest to America’s heart. (Ann Coulter would love the gig, but she’s hopelessly objectionable.) Palin has all the tools, as the sports announcers might say –the looks; the large, messy family; the “hockey mom” cred that William Kristol and all those McCain brain-trusters were going for in the first place when they selected her to be a contestant in that great reality TV show “Who Wants to Be Vice President?”

And what was Palin’s answer?

“Oprah, you are the queen of talk shows. There’s nothing for you to worry about.” (Not that she was, in reality.)

It was, after all, the former Miss Wasilla –No. 3 in a Miss Alaska Pageant (and the Miss Congeniality of that contest) –who was talking to Oprah Winfrey, the former winner of the Miss Black Tennessee Beauty Pageant. These are women who know how to talk to each other.

When Palin gets her time with Barbara Walters, she, too, will be on Palin’s wavelength. Yes, it’s true that Walters, unlike Palin, was a child of American privilege (Sarah Lawrence; her father a legendarily tough nightclub owner and Broadway producer), but if there’s anyone who understands being told what to do by a boys’ club, it’s Babs, the woman who not only got the girls in the TV game but gave them a power game of their own.

It’s the Katie Courics of the world Palin can’t beat, and she knows it. Palin’s only snide-crack in the whole interview was to call Couric “the perky one.” Couric is a journalist born and bred (her father worked for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and UPI). She interned at a news radio station in high school. There isn’t a reality TV show in America that would have Couric; she’s way too smart and focused.

Oprah’s version of Sarah Palin may have been a bit of a crashing bore (my guess is that she knew Palin’s ghostwritten book, chapter and verse, vastly better than Palin did), but Palin was –at long last –almost as likable to scoffers and detractors as her McCain camp discoverers first hoped she would be.

Listen carefully. That sound you hear off in the distance may be Harpo –Oprah’s production company –getting to work on a Palin show. I tell you, she’s a natural.