Incidentally, the references in the following quoted post to Peggy Noonan and William F. Buckley Junior are meant as figures for a New York crowd representative of Rinos across the country who are still part of the party and who do vote. I don't think anyone believes that William F. Buckley Junior himself will ever be won over Sarah Palin.
Equally, the observations made about motivating the base seem archaic at best. Who knew that Barack Obama himself would do more to motivate the conservative base than any other man or woman alive?
That said, here is a post written before the inauguration which echoes other posts from before the election encouraging Sarah Palin to stakeout strong policy positions on issues, especially energy, to establish the gravitas necessary for national candidate. I had foreseen that she should make weighty speeches before venues like The National Press Club but I was probably only betraying my age in an age of Twitter and Facebook:
I believe that Sarah Palin's problem is not that she is "miserably uninformed" but that she is perceived to be uninformed. The media has virtually destroyed her on this issue. Saturday Night Live probably more than any other outlet. To be uninformed is not normally a fatal defect for a politician. By way of example, Vice President elect Joe Biden is miserably misinformed, demonstrably dishonest, and the thief of other man's thoughts, a plagiarist. Nevertheless, he carries the honorific, "Vice President elect Joseph Biden."
Biden gets away with it for two reasons, the media favors him and sounds authoritative. In his debate with Palin he misspoke numerous times but it affected the race not at all. What counts is how the television shows the individual. Biden showed authoritative and Palin, apart from the debate in her interviews with Couric and Gibbons, showed nouveau.
Hence, my suggestion that Palin hire a forensic coach to address the perception problem.
I disagree emphatically that now is too early for Palin to make her mark on the energy issue. She must do the spadework and now so that she can speak from a well-established position of authority when these matters go before the Congress. It will be too late then to both gain recognition and persuade. Let her speak now from a prepared text on the full range of energy issues. It is not merely a question of the price at the pump but of jobs in the coal mines and factories and the price of bread and milk for the kids. The energy issue is a gold mine for conservatives. If we wait we will lose the March.
As much as I agree with you about your assessment of Sarah Palin, I am afraid I must disagree with you about the state of play. We are two years away from the next election and there is no need now to mobilize the base. The need now is to come to Jesus, that is, to find out in our soul what it means to be a conservative. That is the first step. We would be proceeding wrongfooted if we set out looking for a savior. First we have to have a philosophy. I do agree that very likely the leader of the party will be the man (or in this case a woman) who can articulate a philosophy which can, Reagan -like, stitch together the disparate elements of the party, fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, national Defense conservatives, into a coherent fabric which will pull together instead of pulling apart as they are doing now. But, have a care, I do not mean that the spokesperson (I hate that politically correct term I meant to say a "spokesman") should be someone who appeals to only one third of the conservative base. I want a leader who can represent all three legs of the conservative stool. Any fewer will condemn us to another electoral defeat.
In this context, I would prefer Sarah Palin because she has the makings of all three legs of the conservative stool in her biography if she can put away a regrettable tendency toward populism. But I am not going to anoint Palin, I want her to emerge from a Darwinian contest as the clear winner of the ideological consensus which moves the majority of Americans. The very worst scenario would be to impose someone, for example Sarah Palin, on New York's fiscal conservatives who will bolt because they feel she is too provincial. Let her win over the Peggy Noonan's and the William F. Buckley Jr.'s by getting out there and changing her image. If she cannot do so she must fall by the wayside. I am not going to sacrifice the conservative movement to appease social conservatives. We just did that for national defense Conservatives [because George Bush put away the veto pen on spending in a kind of quid pro quo to keep the war in Iraq going] and it cost us the last two elections, it put us in the wilderness for perhaps a generation, and it may well have exposed the country to a Manchurian Marxist who will ultimately sabotage both the national Defense of the United States and Israel which were main motivations of the neocons in the first place.
George Bush came to us and said he was a "compassionate conservative." I did not know what the hell it meant, I have learned over eight years to my sorrow what it means. I do not want the party again to be led down a path by a piper who only shows us some part of his character. I want it committed conservative who will serve all three legs of the conservative movement. I want him tested and I want him proven. We only had two years to do it so we better get on with the job now so that when we need to motivate the base of the next election we will have a real base to motivate.
