That, and she's far more intelligent than anyone gives her credit for: and that includes "savviness" as well as "street smarts" as well as IQ.
People forget that P.A.M. Dirac (relativistic quantum mechanics) ended up at Florida State, and Linus Pauling (two Nobel Prizes) at Oregon State.
Intelligence is not exclusively found at Harvard / Yale--as our last few Presidents have shown, an Ivy Degree can build supreme arrogance, even in the face of reality itself.
Did I say "savvy" ? Yes. Look at the look on her face as she walks away from the podium when she had just announced her resignation as governor.
I see a determined women, saying to herself, "You MOFOs have no CLUE what you just let yourself in for."
(As a private citizen, she was no longer subject to endless manufactured "ethics" charges which she had to pay for out of her own pocket, by state law. One of the lawsuits sued her for using the word 'Official' on her legal defense fund, which she did to distinguish it from the scam defense funds set up by others, not to imply it was "official" in any governmental sense. If she were one-tenth as bad as her detractors claimed, the people behind such lawsuits would have been imprisoned or worse, by the Arctic MafiaTM.)
When you're in the kill zone, taking hits, you don't stand around to prove your purity. You haul ass so as to be able to survive and fight another day.
And she did: but what's more, she didn't retreat. She moved to an even more advantageous position than the one she first held. That's savvy.
Did I say "street smarts"? Yes. "But what about her infamous interview with Kouric, her interview with Gibson?"
First, she was set up by Steve Schmidt and others.
Second, even at that, she did a pretty good job.
Gibson lied through his foul teeth on the air, when he asked her about what he said was a quote of hers; she challenged it, and he persisted, saying, "Exact quote."
But it wasn't, and he got away with it.
Couric's interview took what, four or six hours, unedited.
And yet out of all that, with an explicitly hostile questioner and editor, they could only come up with two sound bytes to hang her with?
Yep, she's smart.
IQ? Beyond a certain competence, (say 120-140), who cares?
The idea is to have the intelligence to following the predigested info your cabinet and other aides bring up, not to come up with ab initio policy formulations in real-time response to new crises.
And Sarah is smart enough, and more importantly, HUMBLE enough, to admit that she doesn't know everything, and so to pick good advisors who love the country as she does, not Communist moles and queer agenda operatives.
And she's Christian.
As far as her policies, I think she shoots from the hip, but she is willing to learn and be corrected when she is wrong. And her goal is to restore America to greatness, not "fundamentally change it" or redistribute wealth.
She really wants to drill here, drill now; she really loves a strong military; she will cut down on government/big corporation collusion; she wants to cut the deficit, and NOT by raising taxes; she is unspeakably pro-life, and pro-Israel; and she is a strong Christian.
As well as pro-gun.
And anti-Obamacare ("death panels").
She has the ability to encapsulate a complex issue into a sound-byte to go AROUND the MSM; and she is media savvy enough to use Facebook and Twitter to help her do so.
And she is pro-traditional marriage: the vile calumny about her choosing a pro-abort judge in Alaska leaves out the fact that she did not have carte blance to PRESENT the candidates: she had to choose among the ones chosen FOR her, and chose the one closest to a strict constructionist.
Which, by the way, she is.
Is that specific and detailed enough?
Cheers!
NO! If you really believe all that stuff, why are you not demanding that she run in 2012?? Wouldnt that be that her moral and patriotic duty? Do you really have that little faith in her?
In response to your fine post, here’s one I did some days back: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2695412/posts?page=130#130