Posted on 07/02/2009 3:25:42 PM PDT by RobinMasters
Oh yes, he went there. We’ve been having a running debate on Twitter this afternoon about Sarahcuda and my contention that criticism of her is verboten among righty blog readers, HA’s included. This thread will be an interesting test case. Most of the heat Kraut takes will be for his contention that “You cannot sustain a campaign of platitudes and clichés over a year and a half if you’re running for the presidency.” Didn’t Captain Hopenchange do exactly that? Well, yes and no. Granted, the most memorable line he uttered in 18 months on the trail was “Yes we can,” but he’s done countless policy interviews, debated Hillary 20 times and McCain three, and held numerous press conferences. The TOTUS jokes are fun but The One’s perfectly capable of straying off script when need be. Is Palin? She seems at ease when discussing energy or life issues but the jury’s still out on most everything else, which is why Kraut feels comfortable asserting that she hasn’t (yet) brushed up on national policy the way we all thought she would.
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
It's not a question of right or wrong as you well know. The media *anoited* The Clueless One, the unwashed masses thought him cool, and that was that. Game set match. He could have slain Michelle during the Demo convention and he would have still made it to 1600 PA Ave.
Palin had a couple of Dan Quayle moments, the libs are scared to death of her, and they tore into her. I think she needs some coaching too, so shoot me already
I agree to a point that Palin have yet to talk about the other stuff in debt, so jury is still out on those issues, but she certainly started out better than when obama first entered the fray. So I disagree with that Palin isn’t a serious candidate for president. I wish Palin will talk more about economic policies and I hope so study up on Austrian economics.
It’s almost like there’s a grand anti Palin conspiracy on our side.
Sarah Palin ... I love her.
But she is not a contender. Very sad.
debt=depth i mean
Krauthammer was giddy for Obama after the latter’s inauguration. He nearly wet himself praising Obama on FOX segments. He since has realized that all that talk of hope and change was merely “platitudes and clichés”.
I like Palin mighty fine and I could not agree less. What is more my 77 year old mom who has voted democrat all her life would crawl across broken glass to vote for Sarah. She hates 0bama now and will gladly vote for Sarah in 2012. I don’t think she’s the only one.
Krauthammer and all the rest of the neocons can keep their liberal Mitts away from Sarah.
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.
She will be soon. Watch.
Well she does need to make her intent clear. Granted its very early but its not like she has to worry about being attacked early and often. The democrats and RINOs are already doing that.
My main concern is that other conservatives will sit this one out to avoid running against her and then get a late start if she decides she doesn’t want to run.
I am a HUGH Palin fan, but she does need to shore up her weak spots. Every person who runs for president has to face this. Republicans have to work even harder, because the Monica Media will work hard to misshape their public images. Democrats like Obama can get over by reading teleprompters and spewing platitudes because the Monica Media cover for them.
If I were her, I would wait for 2016. The Republican Party is too soft to nominate a conservative in 2012 anyway.
Other than on a few elements of foreign policy, I wouldn’t take the sour Kraut too seriously.
Just another beltway rino saying the right things to keep him on the cocktail circut in dc.None of them understand why mcnutts lost but we sure as hell do.Elitist swine.
“You cannot sustain a campaign of platitudes and clichés over a year and a half if you’re running for the presidency.”
LOL! Take a look at who’s in The White House. *SPIT*
When we’re all in rags and unemployed and living in cardboard boxes by 2012, Sarah will be the new ‘Silver-Tongued Devil’ but she’ll be the Devil we know, versus the one we don’t.
I almost wish that Hillary! was in charge. She’s useless to me, but not NEARLY the tool 0bama is.
One quick note on the secession emails with Schmidt:
By the time 2012 rolls around, Todd Palin is going to look like a genius for being interested in an Alaska secession movement....LOL
By then, there might be a viable national secession party!!
The Mittwits just keep posting crap about Palin.
It isn’t going to help the liberal puke Romney!
I like Palin a lot, but any serious presidential contender needs to have some inside Beltway strategists. I’m not advocating that the candidate be a RINO, because as McCain demonstrated, that doesn’t work. But I think of Dubya, who ran as a Washington outsider, but he had people like Carl Rove and Dick Cheney who were savvy campaigners. I hope Palin can surround herself with people like that because she’ll need that. When she spends time in tiffs with David Letterman, she belittles herself. I think she’ll have to lose some of the “folksy”, which I think is refreshing to many people who want a Washington outsider to be the next Republican candidate, but I think that may turn a lot of Reagan Democrats off. And Republicans have a great shot at turning Democrats over to our side in 2012, especially if Obama continues to behave like Carter II.
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