Posted on 04/19/2010 5:52:15 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Sarah Palin, 55 percent unfavorable poll ratings notwithstanding, is a political phenomenon the likes of which American public life rarely has seen. There's something distinctive, something deeply personal, about the way her legions of strong supporters rush not just to defend her but to counter-attack any and all of her critics. Palin has a way of establishing a sense of connectedness with her backers -- such a strong, attitudinal sense that she is not just like them but one of them -- that she has created what amounts to a one-woman, conservative "identity politics" writ very, very large.
Yet if conservatives are to continue a political love affair with this admirable and galvanizing woman, we need to insist on more than mere identity. And more than mere attitude.
We know that Sarah Palin shares our conservative values. But is she the leader conservatives need?
IN HER RECENTLY RELEASED memoir, Going Rogue, Palin tells a story about how she approached the first state budget she handled as governor. It sounds like something right out of the 1993 Kevin Kline movie, Dave, except that Palin's tale is fact instead of fiction.
We worked late into the night with the warm midnight sun still pouring through my office windows....Pens in hand, we combed through the budget, line by line, page by page -- my inner nerd coming out again, just like Wasilla City Council days....I had to know what was in there, or I wasn't doing my job. We spent days trying to decipher who put in what and why. Late one night, I looked up from the table and asked our veteran staffers, "What did past governors do? How did they get through these budgets with so little detail?" "They didn't," was the response.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Fixed
Amen.
In the end, it will be a choice of Sarah Palin, the Great Restorer, or Barack Obama, The Great Destroyer. Not clear as to how reaganaut and Steve b and rabscuttle figure on a majority choosing our obvious destruction.
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Educate me then oh wise one...start by naming all those successful presidential candidates who had a history of quitting their elected positions mid-term because things got too tough. I'll wait.
And you can't resist whining about people being nasty to you about the ad naseum drivel you post. Cry me a river.
Steve Forbes would have done a WAY better job than GWB, but, unfortunately, people don’t vote for a “homely” guy. Our loss.
And it is a total hit piece. The heart of this article is not the fluff you quoted from the very end, the crap the author threw in to give himself a false gloss of intellectual credibility, it is the fraudulent accusations made at the very beginning.
Slander, lie, mislead distort, say something nice about the target at the end to "prove your objectivity" is the standard template for these sort of Media political hit pieces.
From the Article
The first two general-fund budgets for which she was responsible showed spending hikes of 16.4 percent (from fiscal year 2007 to '08) and a mind-boggling 21.8 percent the next year. Total government expenditures (a slightly different measure) grew 38.6 percent in those two years combined.
However when you bother to do some research rather then merely accept the intellectual honesty of the author because he is telling you what you want to hear, you learn something interesting.
The "source" for those numbers is a Huff Po Leftist who admits in his original article he simply made a guess since the state of Alaska has a number of different budgets.
So once again the Palin haters simply made up the data to validate their feelings.
Your question’s premise is of course a fallacy, since the answer wouldn’t exclude a person from winning.
Get a brain. You’re just a hater, you aren’t fooling anybody.
Get over it lol.
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There's a winning argument...She quit an elected position to open her own business.
Get over it? Tell that to the 12-15 million independent voters that she'll need to come close to winning.
Nope, not gonna happen.
Especially if the armchair is bought and paid for by the 'Big R' Republicans.
And you guys just can't resist ignoring the well-documented facts surrounding her last months in office and her resignation, can you?
You are STILL fooled by the tactic of “praising” the person inside your hit piece? Try using your own method and put together all the NEGATIVE comments. See if that sounds like a hit piece? Which one is larger eh?
You’re too stupid to understand politics.
Anybody who thinks that is a good argument, is highly principled, yet doesn’t understand the reality of politics.
I hope Palin runs, but she won’t get the nomination. The primary process is the same and the GOP will make sure she doesn’t get the nod.
All the rest is just a waste of time.
You’re breaking my heart AIT. I love your other stuff.
Sarah Palin does not know with any certainty at all what she will be doing two and a half years from now any more than I know what I’ll be doing then. Wishful thinking won’t make it so, but it can cloud the wisher’s thinking.
Oprah, Jennifer Anniston, Lady GaGa, Beyonce, Tom Cruise and several other “celebrities” can draw crowds. None has any chance of being President.
I will admit that Palin’s followers worship her.
However, despite her zealous support, her supporters are clearly outnumbered by those who do not support her.
These statements above from your post are in the style common to Leftist attack style politics. Conservative are naturally contemptuous of those who engage in such emotion drive debate tactics
So far all you Palin haters do is tell us how you feel about her. The statements above are not based on any facts, they merely are statements of how you feel about her.
Feelings are not facts, you Palin haters really should learn the difference.
I’d rather vote for a quitter who had the best interests of her constituents and budget in mind than someone who stays in office, wastes the taxpayers money on frivolous lawsuits and is so tied down with them, can’t do the job she was elected to do.
You’d prefer a RINO like Romney.
Embrace your beliefs.
That’s part of the chicago thing — da bearsss.
Gee, another insult, what a surprise.
You Palin bashers want a one way war...it doens’t work that way.
Get used to it.
This will give you insight into the Amerian Spectator mentality:
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/t-coddington-van-voorhees-vii/page/5/
Governing Alaska does have some challenges California does not, but they are nothing like governing a state with more than 50 times the population and an economy more than 40 times as large.
Reagan had to face a serious recall attempt less than two years into his governorship, when his approval ratings were at 30%. He survived it to serve another term and face two more recall attempts.
The Presidency offers some buffers against frivolous law suits, but I’d say that’s outweighed by a host of other distractions no governor needs to face. Palin’s inability to both govern and defend against frivolous ethics complaints does not give me a great deal of confidence in her ability to manage the far more overwhelming demands of the Presidency.
Also, those “peculiarities of Alaska law” are, as the author of this article points out, the direct result of the ethics reform package Palin herself pushed through state legislature and one she and her supporters still point to as a great success of her governorship. That she unable or unwilling to endure the consequences of her own reforms also does not look like the stuff of a President.
Defending Palin from the disgusting personal smears against her and her family is something I wholeheartedly support. Comparing her to Reagan or inflating her experience to paper over legitimate concerns over her qualification to be President is not.
If FR represented the majority of American voters we would not be in the mess we are now. The hard fact is that we freepers are a minority faction in American politics. If we here (and I see that you have been here quite a while) cannot unanimously buy the Palin resignation story as described by her FR supporters then what chance does she have of convincing the exponentially larger voting bloc that has never spent a minute here?
In return all I see are insults. But, hey, if that's all you've got then knock yourself out.
You are a tiny part of FR ...lol
FR supports Palin as do many conservatives and Tea Partiers across the country.
You Palin haters are merely a vocal minority.
I dont like Romney. I’m leaning toward Paul Ryan right now.
JM
He’s already announced he’s not running.
It’s going to be Romney or Palin. That’s the way it works in the GOP. We don’t get big surprises like the Dems do.
NO ONE currently serving in either house of the Congress will get my vote, no matter how much I personally support them. We need an executive not a legislator.
That's what happens when someone has to "untrain" themselves from a long-practiced "lipth".
I am just getting here and have read the comments 1 - 45 but not the article. I’ll go read the article now and use your ping as my placemarker.
I definitely prefer executives to legislators, but Romney and Palin are damaged goods. One wont distance themself from RomneyCare and the other quits when the going gets tough.
JM
I thank you for giving reasons for you opinion. Regarding why did she accept the nomination knowing of her daughter’s pregnancy. I’ll answer that by paraphrasing Rush Limbaugh. Sarah accepted the nomination with her daughter’s pregnancy because she has class. Can you imagine the guilt Bristol would bare knowing that her careless actions may have prevented her mother a chance to become President? Refusing the nod would have been damaging to Bristol.
LMAO.
Palin is so in the fight.
And did you read her speech the other night from Louisville? Yes or no?
So who do you think is "electable"?
I think he was bored and thought he'd write a piece about Sarah to please his colleagues.
Of course there are, FR is shot through with trolls and RINObots that would be only too happy to keep Bozo rather than see Palin elected. I, OTH, would vote for Palin in a heart beat and believe that "55%" is a BS number.
Well, good luck in voting for Obama then.
“I agree she is in the fight for the R nomination. I am just explaining why I wont vote for her. “
That’s is fine and your right.
But, please don’t whine when Romney gets the nomination...and don’t cry a river when Obama wins again against DOA Mitt.
That's a less that deep analysis of all that was going on, but you're entitled to it.
1. I think the legal environment in Alaska made her continuation in office an extreme financial burden, and this is verifiable.
2. I think she had political and financial reasons that were far better handled in the lower 48.
3. I think that there was enough time for her republican replacement to gain the recognition he needed after assuming her seat as governor. IOW, she gave her replacement a huge leg up in the next election...she gave him incumbent status.
Others are free to ignore all those reasons. After all, this is, for the time being, a free country.
I’m worried about her support of RINOs. Also worried about her pro nuclear-power position. Also, her un-son-in-law, Levi, who will be paid to cause trouble for her.
Ever hear of damning with faint praise. All of his positive comments are couched in a negative context. And you seriously need to stop and reflect on his carefully calculated bottom line: she ain’t as smart as me and my fellow journalists and Washington elitists, folks; ergo, she’s not ready for prime time.
Maybe if she breathes in enough of this intellectual giant’s effluvia, she’ll one day make the cut. Hope not.
AIT it's always good to see you in forum. Your illuminatingly "scrutable" news and perspectives from the dauntingly inscrutable Far East are immensely helpful to us here... /g
I'm not picking on you here - your comment is simply a convenient hook on which to hang an important alternate perspective. There are two compelling arguments which demonstrate why being a US Senator would be one of the worst places for Sarah Palin to be:
1. First, because of the Senate rules, if the Dems retain control of the Senate Palin as a freshman senator would denied any significant committee posts and frozen out of the loop on any important policy issues. She would be told to keep quiet and remember her place.
Now if the Repubs should regain the Senate and we had a Repub Senate Majority Leader, the treatment Palin would receive would be... exactly... the... same.
The hard truth is that the Senate leadership of both parties consider her, and any other conservative, as their mortal enemy. They would use every Senate rule available to stifle, silence and neutralize her or anyone like her. If she dared to defy them and speak out on her own they would not hesitate to use the ironically-named Senate ethics rules to censure her.
Does that begin to sound familiar? As a sitting senator she would have the same liability and vulnerability to perverted and dishonest use of so-called "ethics rules" by her enemies as she did in Alaska. Being elected to the Senate would be a political kiss of death for Palin. They would either silence her or cripple her.
2. The second argument as to why a Senate term for Palin is wrong is much more simple and succinct: neither we nor she have the time to wait. With the current state of the country and the existing trends, whatever a Senator Palin might do or not do in six years will be irrelevant. By then the constitutional republic bequeathed to us by our forbears will have ceased to exist.
There are valid arguments to be made about the abilities and "fitness" (let's please drop the red herring terminology of "qualified" - it's a constitutionally defined legal requirement and most of us here are "qualified" to be President) of Sarah Palin or any other candidates for the office of President. She, and they, will rise or fall by dint of their performance in the coming months and we'll have to opportunity to choose (maybe...) who we believe to be most fit to be President.
However, events are moving at breathtaking speed both domestically and internationally. It is also beyond obvious that politics is no longer business as usual and the current players and the Obama regime don't give a fig about the traditional rules of the game, or even the law.
Regardless of whoever each of us might prefer as our leader, we need to stop deluding ourselves that we have six more years, or twelve more years, etc. to finally get our ducks in a row and put "our plan" into action. Donald Rumsfeld had it exactly right. We're at war right now, a political war, and we have to fight it right now with the army(people) we have. We don't have the luxury of waiting and hoping for the army(people) we hope we'll have one day.
Did you notice that as well? Only those who are not in love with her will notice that i.e. 80% of the voters.
You are worried because Palin is pro nuclear power?
Now, that is unique.
as the author states:
ALL OF WHICH IS NOT TO SAY that Sarah Palin lacks the right stuff — the right values, the right determination, the right gumption, the right toughness — to serve our nation in high office. She certainly has abundant and admirable amounts and quality of all those virtues, no matter how viciously the left tries to smear her.
She is wise enough to surround herself with the right people....(same as Reagan)...and make the right choices!
....and that scares the hell out of those that couldn't do that!
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