Posted on 08/20/2013 6:12:13 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
When Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol suggested on Sunday that Sarah Palin restart her political career by running for Senate, people noticed, because more than anyone else more than John McCain, the candidate who picked her as his running mate, more than Steve Schmidt, the adviser who urged McCain to do it Kristol is credited with launching Palin's career. On Tuesday, Kristol made it clear he does not want all that credit (or blame).
On MSNBC's Morning Joe, Nicolle Wallace, who was Palin's aide during the 2008 campaign, asked Kristol, "How did you feel as sort of being branded as the godfather of Sarah Palin, Inc.?" He responded, "It's not the worst thing that's ever been said about me. You know, I have a thick skin." Of his suggestion she run for Senate on Sunday, Kristol said he was not predicting or endorsing a Palin candidacy in 2014. "I was asked, 'Does Sarah Palin have a future?' and I just tried to give an analytical answer which is, I dont think she does " They don't even chat these days, he said. "I haven't been in touch with her in a year or so."
Why does Kristol get so much Palin blame? By October 2008, Palin's vice-presidential candidacy looked so disastrous that The New Yorker published an explainer for how she got to be picked as McCain's running mate in the first place. Jane Mayer pegged Kristol as the No. 1 culprit. A circle of Republican commentators had developed a political crush on Sarah Palin during a luxury cruise to Alaska in 2007, she reported. Kristol was her "most ardent promoter
and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska's political circles." By the summer of 2008, Kristol was campaigning for McCain to pick Palin....
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlanticwire.com ...
She is the only reason I voted at all that year.
Well, the media has distorted the Palin history as thoroughly as they have distorted the Zimmerman history.
All I’m saying is, Palin is my first choice in 2016.
Nobody else has my vote. Cruz has my respect, and my attention. But Palin has my vote.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah?
I agree with you, but Bill Kristol was the person who brought her to the national stage. He likes her.
.....But he knows that the resignation thing is something that she is going to have to overcome.
The “resignation thing”, has been blown into a fantasy.
Unfortunately there are those on FR who go along with it.
Gee for someone so darn irrelevant the left sure does talk about her a lot don’t they..as far as Bill Kristol not getting why she resigned..gee, is Sarah going to have to use sock puppets to reenact why she resigned..really, a person with an IQ above plant life knows why..she was being harassed constantly with frivolous lawsuits by leftist thugs who wanted to destroy her, she could no longer do her job, gee how hard is that for people to understand
Exactly. I bothered to vote only in the hope that JM would win and have a serious health issue disqualifying him from serving shortly thereafter.
How about she restart her career by finishing a term on the by stage?
That would be a start.
The what? Huh?
Conservative columnist kristol... if kristol is forgiven for being a liberal democrat and working for daniel patrick moynahan and promoting the left’s agenda... I think Palin will be ok.
yeah....ya know...the by stage....meh, whatever.....
Fact #1: Sarah Palin with her savvy-ness can energize tens of millions of grass root tea partiers.
Fact #2: Sarah Palin either has adoring fans or loathing enemies. Everybody has an opinion about her. They either love or hate her.
Fact #3: The Republican establishment does not like Sarah Palin.
Fact #4: The liberal media has succeeded in making Palin a laughing stock among left leaning, especially media impressionable young people.
Given those facts, Sarah Palin cannot win the general election simply with the help of tea partiers — she needs the support of the Republican establishment just to keep the rabid liberals and the young people at bay. At the least, she needs the establishment not to sabotage her. Realistically, Sarah Palin is not a general election winner.
She is best at support and energizing/fundraising role. Elected office is beneath her now.
I strongly disagree.
Palin stood down just before the last primary race.
At the very top.
She has a huge wellspring of untapped potential.
I think she should keep preparing, to run in 2016.
By Gary P Jackson
The latest issue of Vogue magazine has notorious late term abortion supporter, Wendy Davis of Texas, on its cover, with a puff piece to match. That bears further discussion, but for now, on this glorious Friday afternoon, lets look back and remember the time Vogue put a woman of substance, style, and actual accomplishments on their cover.
Much better to celebrate a woman who helped create a modern city, blew the whistle on massive corruption in her own party, and as Governor, turned around a failed government
. than a woman whos only claim to fame is the blood-lust of abortion.
Condé Nast recycled Vogues cover art:
Heres the cover of Alaska magazine mentioned in the article:
Sarah Palin: Altered State
A woman governorAlaskan Republican Sarah Palinis attracting national attention by breaking the mold at home.
By Rebecca Johnson. Photographed by Jonathan Becker:
The editor of Alaska magazine had a problem. State governor Sarah Palin, with her historically high approval rating and natural good looks (one blogger called her Tina Feys sexier sister), seemed a natural choice for the cover of his magazine. Problem was, the picture they had shot in her Juneau office showed Palin smiling. The official governors portrait of her? Smiling. The pictures for her campaign against the incumbent Republican governor? Also smiling. That time she won the Miss Wasilla beauty contest 24 years ago? Probably smiling too.
This time, they were shooting her in her Anchorage office on the seventeenth floor of a downtown skyscraper overlooking the snow-covered Chugach mountains. I dont want you to look mean, the editor told the governor when she arrived. Just dont smile.
OK. Palin looked skeptical. Ill try. She folded her arms and looked straight into the lens. As the camera clicked, the corners of her mouth began to twitch.
This is really hard for her, her spokesperson observed from the back of the room. She is always smiling.
After a dozen or so clicks, the tension was too much. OK, the editor relented. Go ahead and smile.
Thank you! she answered, releasing the expression like a caged animal. Outside, the dying winter sun briefly lit the mountains with a rosy light and then was gone. She really is a breath of fresh air, the editor said as the photographer packed up his equipment. It feels like a new era in Alaska.
Alaska is a state full of contradictions. Gloriously beautiful, seriously cold, and magnificently endowed with an abundance of resources beginning to feel scarceoil, natural gas, and fishthe state prides itself on its fierce independence. ALASKA, the license plate reads, THE LAST FRONTIER. At the same time, only 1 percent of that stunning land is owned by individuals. The majority is controlled by the federal government, from which the state receives more money per capita than any other in the Union, creating an ambivalent master/slave relationship, with resentment on both sides. What revenue Alaska does create comes primarily from the oil and gas companies whose operations on the North Slope keep a large percentage of Alaskans workingincluding Palins own husband, Todd, a part-native snowmobile champion whom the press likes to refer to as First Dude.
In recent years, that mix of federal largesse and big-oil money seems to have created a culture of impunity for lawmakers, and turned Alaska into a place where votes on behalf of oil interests could be bought for not much more than the price of a used car. After a three-year-long undercover investigation by the FBI, three lawmakers and several businessmen were convicted of making or receiving bribes to keep a tax on oil profits at an artificially low rate of 20 percent. More indictments are expected, causing the eyes of America to turn toward Alaska.
The morning I went to visit Palins office, CNN was interviewing the governor on the subject. Has Alaska become a joke? the reporter asked, referring to the way lawmakers seemed to revel in their venality, even having caps printed with the initials CBC, for Corrupt Bastards Club.
Palin grimaced. It breaks my heart to hear that we are being ridiculed like that, but it just solidifies my commitment to clean things up, she answered. Since taking office in December 2006, she has enacted legislation mandating a one-year waiting period for politicians between leaving office and working for the energy industry. She also put the Westwind jet her predecessor had bought up for sale on eBay. He had argued he needed the plane to fly around the state, but the small native villages that dot the interior of the state have gravel runways. Westwind jets can land only on asphalt.
Pain her as they may, those revelations of corruption may have been the very thing that swept this 44-year-old Republican mother of four, whose main political experience was running a small Alaskan town (Wasilla, population 6,000), into the governors office. As mayor, she was seen as a golden girl of the Republican Party, a hardworking, pro-business politician whose friendly demeanor (that Palin smile!) made her palatable to the typical pickup-driving Alaskan man. She ran because she wanted basic amenities for her townpaved roads, a police force. And she wasnt afraid of a challenge. I recognized, she says, that if we had the same good old boys serving, nothing would change. We needed some new blood. I also recognized that you had to be the top dog to make those changes.
Besides being telegenic, she had a tough-girl Alaskan résumé that most politicians could only dream ofthe protein her family eats comes from fish she has pulled out of the ocean with her own hands and caribou she has shot. Its never bothered me, she says. That caribou has had a good life. Its been free out there on the tundra, not caged up on a farm with no place to move.
During the summer, she and her husband spend time commercial-fishing thanks to a permit that has been passed down on the native side of his family from generation to generation. Its the kind of brutal work that most Americans stopped doing generations ago, but Palin relishes the challenge. I look forward to it every year, she says.
When term limits forced Palin out of the mayorship in 2002, she was appointed Chairman of the Oil & Gas Conservation Commission by the Republican powers that be. The position seemed like a dream. With four children to raise and a husband whose blue-collar job pays an hourly wage, the six-figure salary was more than welcome, but it didnt take her long to become disillusioned by the unethical behavior she witnessed firsthand. What I saw was so obviously wrong. I was so disappointed and shocked, she says. Oil and gas revenue account for more than 80 percent of the states budget, but Alaskans were never going to trust us if that was how we conducted business. When her complaints were ignored, Palin saw no choice but to resign in protest. The once golden girl was suddenly out of a job.
Palin spent the next year at home, focusing on her children. But if politics is a disease, she had caught it bad. When the gubernatorial election rolled around, she waited for someone within the party to run against a governor whose disapproval ratings make George W. Bush look popular. Switching to the Democratic Party was never an option for Palin, a pro-life, free-market, NRA supporter whose most fervent wish for Alaska is to open up areas of federal wilderness land for oil development. So she stepped up to the plate and ran a campaign composed mostly of friends, family, and small donations made by people who had never before contributed to a political race.
It would have been an ideal time for the Democrats to come back to power, says Tom Kizzia, a political reporter at The Anchorage Daily News, but then Palin came along as a Republican outsider. Her positions might not have been as thought out as some of the other candidates, but she had this small-town sincerity that voters found very appealing. Shes the kind of person who can sit and talk with you at her sons hockey game, but when she walks in the room, people stir. When the candidates were asked their favorite meal, Kizzia remembers, Palin nailed it best. Moose stew, she said, after a day of snowmachining.
Environmentalists may be uncomfortable with her desire to allow developers into wilderness areas such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but the stakes for her are high and close to home. A few months ago, her eighteen-year-old son signed up with the U.S. Army. When his basic training finishes, he will almost certainly be sent to Iraq. That made it personal for me, she says. This kid is doing everything he can to protect the safety of the United States. Are we? Are we producing a domestic, secure form of energy instead of relying on foreign sources? We need to be doing more. And we can.
Curious about what kind of a background could produce someone like Palin, I called up her parents, who live 40 miles from Anchorage in the small town where Palin was mayor. Come on over, her father, Chuck Heath, said on the phone, unless you have a problem with small dead animals.
Rarely has a yard so clearly broadcast the personality of its owners. A mound of a thousand caribou antlers rose next to the driveway, creating a surreal vision of an igloo made of bones. In between the birches stretched a stack of firewood the length of a semi-trailer. Buoys of all colors hung from the house and outer buildings. On the back of the Heaths 4×4 a bumper sticker read, VEGETARIANOLD INDIAN WORD FOR BAD HUNTER.
Chuck and Sally Heath are both retired from their jobs, she as a school secretary and he as a middle school science teacher, but they continue to work part-time as nuisance-control specialists (a.k.a. trappers) for the Department of Agriculture. Their most memorable assignment was trapping rats in the debris from the World Trade Center at the Fresh Kills landfill after 9/11. Neither Sally, a motherly former marathon runner who urges oatmeal cookies and herbal tea on visitors, nor her husband thought for a moment that a girl couldnt do everything a boy could. Nor can they remember a time when their now-prominent daughter, one of four children, balked at the lifestyle they lead well, there was that one early-morning hunt when Chuck asked Sarah to hold the eyeballs of the moose he was skinning.
Both recall Palin as a disciplined child who was impossible to sway once she made up her mind, but neither has any idea where she got her taste for politics. It certainly wasnt something they discussed as a family at the dinner table. Nothey shook their headsmostly we discussed sports. When Palin did announce her desire to run for mayor, Chuck was initially skeptical but agreed to drive her around town. More than a few doors were slammed in her face. But once they started talking to her, I could see she had a gift, he says.
Downstairs, the parents took me on a tour of hundreds of family photos showing the Heaths and their children engaged in various hunting and sporting events. There was Sarah finishing a marathon. Chuck with a dead grizzly bear. The one picture that did not seem to belong showed a young Sarah Palin wearing a strapless gown and a rhinestone tiara as Miss Wasilla 1984. That wasnt her thing, Chuck said. We were really surprised when she wanted to do it.
The scholarship money she won from the beauty contest helped pay for college tuition at the University of Idaho, where she majored in journalism and dreamed of being a sportscaster on ESPN (until she realized that would mean leaving her beloved Alaska). Looking back on the pageant experience, Palin herself seems chagrined. They made us line up in bathing suits and turn our backs so the male judges could look at our butts. I couldnt believe it!
Palins own three daughters love clothes and relish shopping at the one Nordstrom in downtown Anchorage, but growing up in Alaska in the 1970s, the governor ordered her clothes from a Sears catalog. Id say my favorite designers are Patagonia and North Face, she jokes. That hasnt kept others from commenting on her appearance, like Washington, D.C.-based blogWonkette that has called her the hottest governor in all 50 states and my total girl crush. Developing a thick skin when it comes to comments about her looks has been part of the learning process. Ive been taken aback by the nasty criticism about my appearance, she says. I wish theyd stick with the issues instead of discussing my black go-go boots. A reporter once asked me about it during the campaign, and I assured him I was trying to be as frumpy as I could by wearing my hair on top of my head and these schoolmarm glasses, but he said, No, thats not what I mean. I guess I was naive, but when I hear people talk about it I just want to escort them back to the Neanderthal cave while we get down to business.
Theres a small but vocal cabal (the press calls them Palinistas) who like to mention her as a national star, maybe even a Republican vice-presidential candidate. That seems unlikelywith only 670,000 residents, Alaska delivers fewer voters than a medium-size city in middle America. Whatever the plan, Palin herself isnt saying. Right now, Im just so grateful to be serving out this term. Beyond that? Dang, thats a long time away.
Sarah Palin has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the February 2008 issue of Vogue.
As noted, as early as February of 2008, there was a growing Draft Sarah for VP movement across the United States. A movement that was quite successful, I might add.
THAT is my identical position.
Palin - 2016
Agreed
Barf alert required with this one...another insignificant trying to hitch his wagon to Sarah's power.
No wonder the Republicans are the stupid party. They can’t see that Sarah helped McCain’s election chances, and then when Mitt loses, they think its because they need to reach out to the Hispanics.
I believe in the platform of the Republican party, but the RINOs and stupids have ruined it.
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