She has very few principles. What she has are instincts. And she gets support because there are a lot of people out there that share her instincts. But that's not enough.
Reagan worked out because he had more than instincts. He had a complete political philosophy developed over years. Just read Reagan, In His Own Hand.You'll see that Reagan was already miles ahead of where Palin is now.
Now maybe one day Sarah will be a Reagan. At the moment she's terribly politically immature. She's going to have to work a lot harder trying to understand why she believes what she believes. I don't think she'll do it though. She's too intellectually lazy. That's not the same thing as being stupid. She's not stupid at all. But ideas matter. And the foundation for those ideas matters, too.
Welcome Back, Dad
"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! 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. Welcome back, Dad, even if you're wearing a dress and bearing children this time around."
~Michael Reagan, son of President Ronald Reagan