In the Grand Tradition of Jefferson & Reagan
Posted on 07/11/2009 10:48:53 AM PDT by Bob J
We all loved Sarah. She rescued the sinking McCain campaign, said all the right things and holds pretty much the same positions of most FReepers.
They all love Obama. He rescued the sinking DNC, said all the right things and holds pretty much the same positions of most liberals.
Dems, liberals and the MSM are condemned for their all consuming adoration, virtual blindness to any mistakes or faults and slobbering worship of the man. Yet when the same thing happens to Palin it turns into a virtue.
Sarah was a real coup for conservatives. But when she announced her resignation many of us saw this for what it was, a deal breaker for a Presidential campaign. Oh she might run in '12 and she might even win the nomination. But she will not be able to shake the black mark of being labeled a "quitter" by her opponent and the MSM and it is very unlikely she will be able to garner the votes among right leaning dems and independents needed to win the general election.
Sarah decided to give up the hardship of public service. Hers was much harder than most, her opponents and the MSM were relentless in their vicious attacks and persecution. Instead she decided to go for the gold, writing books, the lucrative speakers circuit, not having to answer to a hostile critics and media.
I don't blame her, I think she did what was best for herself and family so I hold no animosity for it. But let's not deceive ourselves. She effectively has taken herself out of the game, a game in which we all were invested heavily in her political future. We NEEDED Sarah to lead a conservative revolution and anyone who thinks she can do it from the sidelines, the speakers circuit, is fooling themselves, just look at Newt. Sarah wnet for Sarah and we were kicked to the curb.
All I'm wondering is if the Palin cheering section, the one that praises every move, every decision whether it's good or bad, the ones that believe she can do no wrong, the ones who look to Sarah as a second coming of some sort, can you please take off the blinders for one second and see reality of the situation?
I ask this because I see these blind followers possibly leading us down a road to failure in '12. Let Sarah be, let her speak, write books, continue saying all the right things, make lots of money and establish some peace in her private life. She, of all, knows her decision has taken her out of the presidential ball game and she is good with it (if she doesn't then she does not have the political savvy to earn our support).
But quit with the relentless, vicious, nasty and foul attacks on your fellow FReepers who have taken the blinders off and made peace with what this all means. You're not doing Sarah any good and of she read some of things that are being written here I have a feeling she'd be the first to blush and ask it to stop.
Poke a pitbull in the eye and expect to get bitten.
scratch any Palin basher and it’s just like South bashers...they fall neatly into the “What Culture War? camp
She has stated her support for:
This is the qualitative difference between her and any of the other Republican candidates to grace the national stage in recent years. They pretend to be American on one or two issues. The Democrats don't even pretend to be for America.
She is pro-American. They are anti-American globalists of various sorts. It is that simple.
Duncan Hunter could not get it done. Fred Thompson could not get it done.
And then McCain, quite unintentionally, unleashes the previously unknown Palin upon the political scene. She takes the Conservative movement by storm, but in so doing brings down the worst sort of smears and vicious attacks upon herself and her family, not only from libs, but also from within the corrupt GOP. No one was there to help her, as she was bottled up in Alaska and on her own for all intents and purposes.
Now that she has freed herself from the trap and is about to launch a Nationwide Conservative campaign, we are rallying around her. But there are those like you, Bob, who are deriding our support as "blind worship."
Needless to say, I find it reprehensible and even incredible that there are people on this board who not only doubt her, but are completely willing to trash her in favor of the same ol' RINO fare we've been force-fed over the years.
It is now my firm opinion that there are a bunch of damned hypocrites on this board who are all mouth and no gumption. You've been pining away for years for a Conservative who you can rally around. Now that we've got one, you not only run away from her, but you also sneer at those of us who are lining up behind her.
Screw you all, I say!
You're despicable.
Pull you head out, Bob.
If Barack Obama has been the most remarkable phenomenon of the recent political scene, Sarah Palin must be second. The emotional responses to each-- especially by the media and the intelligentsia -- go beyond anything that can be explained by the usual political differences of opinion on issues of the day.
That liberals would be thrilled by another liberal is not surprising. But there are conservative Republicans who voted for Barack Obama, and other conservatives who may not have voted for him, but who are quick to see in various pragmatic moves of his since taking office an indication that he is not an extremist.
Anyone familiar with history knows that Hitler and Stalin were pragmatic. After years of denouncing each other, they signed the Nazi-Soviet pact under which they became allies for a couple of years before going to war against one another.
Pragmatism tells you nothing about extremism. But the conservative intellectuals who seize upon President Obama's pragmatism to give him the benefit of the doubt are obviously bending over backward for some reason.
With Governor Palin, it is just the opposite. The conservative intelligentsia who react against her have remarkably little to say that will stand up to scrutiny. People who actually dealt with her, before she became a national figure, have expressed how much they were impressed by her intelligence.
Governor Palin's "inexperience" is a talking point that might have some plausibility if it were not for the fact that Barack Obama has far less experience in actually making policies than Sarah Palin has. Joe Biden has had decades of experience in being both consistently wrong and consistently a source of asinine statements.
Governor Palin's candidacy for the vice presidency was what galvanized grass roots Republicans in a way that John McCain never did. But there was something about her that turned even some conservative intellectuals against her and provoked visceral anger and hatred from liberal intellectuals.
Perhaps the best way to try to understand these reactions is to recall what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she first saw Whittaker Chambers, who had accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Upon seeing the slouching, overweight and disheveled Chambers, she said, "He's not one of us."
The trim, erect and impeccably dressed Alger Hiss, with his Ivy League and New Deal pedigree, clearly was "one of us." As it turned out, he was also a liar and a spy for the Soviet Union. Not only did a jury decide that at the time, the opening of the secret files of the Soviet Union in its last days added more evidence of his guilt.
The Hiss-Chambers confrontation of more than half a century ago produced the same kind of visceral polarization that Governor Sarah Palin provokes today.
Before the first trial of Alger Hiss began, reporters who gathered at the courthouse informally sounded each other out as to which of them they believed, before any evidence had been presented. Most believed that Hiss was telling the truth and that it was Chambers who was lying.
More important, those reporters who believed that Chambers was telling the truth were immediately ostracized. None of this could have been based on the evidence for either side, for that evidence had not yet been presented in court.
For decades after Hiss was convicted and sent to federal prison, much of the media and the intelligentsia defended him. To this day, there is an Alger Hiss chair at Bard College.
Why did it matter so much to so many people which of two previously little-known men was telling the truth? Because what was on trial was not one man but a whole vision of the world and a way of life.
Governor Sarah Palin is both a challenge and an affront to that vision and that way of life-- an overdue challenge, much as Chambers' challenge was overdue.
Whether Governor Palin runs for national office again is something that only time will tell. But the Republicans need some candidate who is neither one of the country club Republicans nor-- worse yet-- the sort of person who appeals to the intelligentsia.
I've been trying to convince my fellow conservatives that they have been wasting their time in a fruitless quest for a new Ronald Reagan to emerge and lead our party and our nation. I insisted that we'd never see his like again because he was one of a kind.
I was wrong!
Wednesday night I watched the Republican National Convention on television and there, before my very eyes, I saw my Dad reborn; only this time he's a she.
And what a she!
In one blockbuster of a speech, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin resurrected my Dad's indomitable spirit and sent it soaring above the convention center, shooting shock waves through the cynical media's assigned spaces and electrifying the huge audience with the kind of inspiring rhetoric we haven't heard since my Dad left the scene.
This was Ronald Reagan at his best -- the same Ronald Reagan who made the address known now solely as "The Speech," which during the Goldwater campaign set the tone and the agenda for the rebirth of the traditional conservative movement that later sent him to the White House for eight years and revived the moribund GOP.
Last night was an extraordinary event. Widely seen beforehand as a make-or-break effort -- either an opportunity for Sarah Palin to show that she was the happy warrior that John McCain assured us she was, or a disaster that would dash McCain's presidential hopes and send her back to Alaska, sadder but wiser.
Obviously un-intimidated by either the savage onslaught to which the left-leaning media had subjected her, or the incredible challenge she faced -- and oozing with confidence -- she strode defiantly to the podium and proved she was everything and even more than John McCain told us.
Much has been made of the fact that she is a woman. What we saw last night, however, was something much more than a just a woman accomplishing something no Republican woman has ever achieved. What we saw was a red-blooded American with that rare, God-given ability to rally her dispirited fellow Republicans and take up the daunting task of leading them -- and all her fellow Americans -- on a pilgrimage to that shining city on the hill my father envisioned as our nation's real destination.
In a few words she managed to rip the mask from the faces of her Democratic rivals and reveal them for what they are -- a pair of old-fashioned liberals making promises that cannot be kept without bankrupting the nation and reducing most Americans to the status of mendicants begging for their daily bread at the feet of an all-powerful government.
Most important, by comparing her own stunning record of achievement with his, she showed Barack Obama for the sham that he is, a man without any solid accomplishments beyond conspicuous self-aggrandizement.
Like Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin is one of us. She knows how most of us live because that's the way she lives. She shares our homespun values and our beliefs, and she glories in her status as a small-town woman who put her shoulder to the wheel and made life better for her neighbors.
Her astonishing rise up from the grass-roots, her total lack of self-importance, and her ordinary American values and modest lifestyle reveal her to be the kind of hard-working, optimistic, ordinary American who made this country the greatest, most powerful nation on the face of the earth.
As hard as you might try, you won't find that kind of plain-spoken, down-to-earth, self-reliant American in the upper ranks of the liberal-infested, elitist Democratic Party, or in the Obama campaign.
Sarah Palin didn't go to Harvard, or fiddle around in urban neighborhood leftist activism while engaging in opportunism within the ranks of one of the nation's most corrupt political machines, never challenging it and going along to get along, like Barack Obama.
Instead she took on the corrupt establishment in Alaska and beat it, rising to the governorship while bringing reforms to every level of government she served in on her way up the ladder.
Welcome back, Dad, even if you're wearing a dress and bearing children this time around.
I’ll just refer you to his post #44. That says it all.
To summarize baseball legend Reggie Jackson: nobody boos a nobody. That is definitely true in the case of Governor Sarah Palin. I don’t think I am going out on a limb here when I speculate that individuals who repeatedly attack her anonymously view her as a threat. And that includes members of the media hell-bent tearing down young Republican up-and-comers as well as some in Governor Palin’s own party — a party desperately in need of redefining — who are motivated, for whatever reason, to try and crush their rivals.
The most recent and grossly unfair attack came from Vanity Fair magazine. The writer clearly had an unshakable point of view from the start and talked only to those who would criticize. For example, he personally asked me at event preceding the White House Correspondents Dinner if I would talk to him about Governor Palin. I agreed. He didn’t call. He didn’t email. He never once tried to get my take. I also know he never contacted campaign manager Rick Davis, or John McCain.
I have known many political leaders over four decades including all Republican presidents and VPs. I have come to know Sarah Palin over the past year and can state unequivocally that she is smart, curious, hard working, charming, and effective. She also has something her detractors clearly lack – a sense of honor and loyalty.
I know this is petty, but it reminds me of the 2004 presidential election where it was commonplace and accepted in much of the mainstream media to call President Bush stupid and Senator Kerry smart and insightful. At the end of the day, when Senator Kerry finally released his college transcripts, wouldn’t you know: he did quite a bit worse than President Bush.
I have seen Sarah up close with leading heavyweights, and have seen her hold her own and then some. At the dinner at my home referenced in the article, she engaged comfortably and deeply with people ranging from Alan Greenspan to Madeleine Albright to Mitch McConnell. She asked for a foreign policy discussion on her June 7 trip to Washington, and I saw her engage in an informed and spirited manner with Frank Carlucci.
Governor Palin has many admirers and defenders out there who will not allow her to be branded by jealous rivals with their own agenda and the elitists in the national media. I am not sure who the unnamed Vanity Fair sources are, but without question they lack chivalry and have acted in a craven manner. They also lack the facts. I am ashamed of my former campaign colleagues, whoever they are.
You know that is not true. She said she would support conservatives.
Conservative Snobs Are Wrong About Palin
I know Maggie Thatcher. The two women have a lot in common.
The republican party is full of petty leaders each representing a different coalition, each trying to become top dog. Enough already.
When we find a charismatic, well-spoken leader representing the right ideas, we should COMMIT to that person, and demand that the bickering cease over who is the real leader.
That’s what Palin represents...a leader...THE candidate. Now, on to organizing around that leader.
The would-be leaders — McCain, Huckabee, Romney, etc. — risk becoming anklebiters and baggage, unless they put advancing ideas first, and advancing careers second. Palin has shown her willingness to put career second by leaving office. Do other would-be leaders have the courage to step down from their own positions, and put trust in their ability to attract a following on a shoestring? (They haven’t, should, but never will.)
What is the dollar value of a candidate’s ability to spontaneously attract a national movement? Priceless. Romney hasn’t got enough money ; neither has any other conservative would-be candidate, with or without GOP help.
Exactly. And thankfully, Sanford is also out of the picture. 2012 isn’t that far away. We need to get working on building up a small group of *electable* candidates. If there are any hidden gems out there who haven’t registered on the 2012 POTUS radar screen yet, now is the time for them to come out into the sunshine so we can inspect and evaluate them.
Maybe 20 years from now, Sarah Palin will have grown into a serious political figure, if she really wants to and workks hard to that end. But as far as the next few POTUS election cycles are concerned, the only way she can be a positive force is as a supporter of other candidates. Trying to position herself as a contender, she’s just a cartoonish and damaging distraction.
I am owed an apology.
Bob probably figured if he used the word “we” enough times it would help obscure the fact that ever since the election was decided last Nov. he’s been devoting much of his time on FR attempting to bite Sarah’s ankles.
Very simple: Palin supporters support the values she represents. Obama supporters supported the man, no matter what the values.
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