When I look back at how she handled the negative waves after the election we see that at the time when she held the chief executive office, when she held, I think, control of the Legislature, she was either incapable or unwilling to win in Alaska.
I understand she was financially beleaguered and I understand that the state was to some degree suffering by the Democrats' scorched earth war against her with ethics complaints. But, for whatever reason, she did not turn it around then against charges that subsequently have been proved to be baseless and that performance does not give me confidence that she will be able to it turn around on the national stage against the whole of the establishment media.
It is now 3 years since Tina Fey and Katie Couric took her apart on national television and she has not put herself back together for the mass of the country since.
This is not so much a question whether she can be nominated but whether she can be elected when the jury changes stripes. I agree with you, once a candidate acquires nomination he or she acquires a degree of legitimacy, but not always. I am old enough to have lived through the Barry Goldwater debacle and I will never forget what the media did to him. By the end of the campaign my neighbors thought he was a raving racist and a nutcase who would no doubt blow up the world.
I once attended a rally for Barry Goldwater and personally witnessed his supporters unable to gain admission to the event because there were so many of them. I went home, turned on the 11 o'clock news and was astonished to see that my eyes had been lying to me. Through the magic of television his supporters had morphed into protesters.
These are the realities which I have seen. The question is, is the risk of electability carried by Sarah Palin worth taking a chance when we could have almost everything we get with Palin in Bachmann or even in Perry with the last being eminently more electable?
A couple of days ago I put it this way in a reply:
"As for Palin, we know we would get a bona fide conservative but we fear she cannot get elected. My subjective conclusion is that her disadvantages concerning electability are more to be feared than Perry's defections from orthodox conservatism. I weigh the likelihood of the two and the degree of harm from the two and come up with a subjective judgment: if we lose the election we lose everything (and that includes our whole experiment in democracy) but if we get Perry, we get almost everything.
"I fully understand a subjective judgment that says we have got into this mess because we had 12 years of Rinos, 8 of them out of Texas, and we don't need any more. In other words, if we win the election with Perry, we won't get much of anything."
We will know soon whether Palin is going to force this decision upon us.
