I don't know how old you are, but if you think Ronald Reagan was given a “vast amount of respect and good press” by the press before he ran for President, you are totally mistaken, or maybe you were not alive then.
The press portrayed Reagan as some kind of amiable idiot, an air head, and someone bereft of much intellectual heft
NORMAN PODHORETZ wrote an article about it in the Wall street Journal just yesterday:
“Nothing annoys certain of my fellow conservative intellectuals more than when I remind them, as on occasion I mischievously do, that the derogatory things they say about Sarah Palin are uncannily similar to what many of their forebears once said about Ronald Reagan.
It's hard to imagine now, but 31 years ago, when I first announced that I was supporting Reagan in his bid for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, I was routinely asked by friends on the right how I could possibly associate myself with this “airhead,” this B movie star, who was not only stupid but incompetent. They readily acknowledged that his political views were on the whole close to ours, but the embarrassing primitivism with which he expressed them only served, they said, to undermine their credibility. In any case, his base was so narrow that he had no chance of rescuing us from the disastrous administration of Jimmy Carter.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703909804575123773804984924.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn
Sound familiar?
She has considerable strengths, unique to only her right now.
I want her to play up those strength's if she decides to run for President of the United States.
Right now, with FOX, IMHO, she is not because we already know she can do these kind of things. So, imo, she has decided not to run in 12.