Free Republic

A few weeks ago, the race for the Republican presidential nomination was a jumble of candidates, none of whom seemed to be winning the party's hearts or minds: Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Newt Gingrich. For a moment, some GOP voters even pinned their hopes on pizza magnate Herman Cain, mostly because he didn't sound — or look — like the others. But now, if you talk with Republican political professionals, the GOP race has suddenly settled into a contest among only two or three potential nominees. There's Romney, still the front-runner, stolidly running a cautious and conventional campaign. There's Michele...

Palin moves spark 2012 speculation By: Andy Barr May 25, 2011 07:41 PM EDT Sarah Palin is fond of saying she’ll feel compelled to run for president “if nobody else were to step up.”It just might come to that.The recent departures of Mitch Daniels and Mike Huckabee from the 2012 GOP field, combined with a flurry of recent moves by Palin—staff changes, the purchase of a home in Arizona, the Iowa premiere of a new feature-length film extolling the former Alaska governor—is rekindling speculation that she sees an opportunity in 2012 and may be thinking more seriously than ever about...

Mike Huckabee’s supporters might not rush to the side of Sarah Palin, despite the conventional wisdom that she’ll be the key beneficiary of his decision not to run for president next year. Both the former governor of Arkansas and former governor of Alaska are populist Republicans with strong evangelical credentials. Yet there are some significant differences between the two that suggest Huckabee supporters might not flock to Palin en masse. Style Palin’s and Huckabee’s rhetorical styles couldn’t be more different. Palin mocks her Democratic opponents; Huckabee tends to engage them and look for common ground. When first lady Michelle Obama...

Sarah Palin's record as governor of Alaska has largely gone unchallenged by conservatives, despite the fact that one of her signature legacies was imposing an oil profits tax -- a distinctly liberal idea. Now, Republicans in the state Legislature and Palin's own Republican replacement, Gov. Sean Parnell, have scored a victory in an attempt to reverse her tax hike. Democrats, though, stood strong with Palin in opposing any rollback on the tax hike.

One prominent Republican calls on his party to drum Palin out of the 2012 race. Here's why he'll be disappointed. "Morning Joe" Scarborough earned a splash of attention within the politerati this week with a Politico column calling on the Republican Party to "man up" and denounce Sarah Palin. His main point is that Palin is poison for the Grand Old Party: The most-talked-about figure in the GOP is a reality show star who cannot be elected. And yet the same leaders who fret that Sarah Palin could devastate their party in 2012 are too scared to say in public...

In the promo fluff for its future flop, CNN calls Kathleen Parker a "conservative" commentator. So what's a "conservative" in CNN's book? Someone who, when accused of taking part in the media assassination of Sarah Palin, brags that she didn't merely take part—she "led it." Supposed conservative Kathleen Parker made her bizarre boast on this evening's Parker Spitzer. It came in the course of her interview of John Ziegler, creator of the documentary "Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted.” While denying she had been "duped" by Obama, Parker admitted that during the campaign she "bought into...

Does this really surprise anyone? Currently, the liberal psuedo-news site the Huffington Post has a gigantic picture of former VP candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and a 99 font size (and all capital letters) "GOTCHA" on the front of their website: The picture, which intentionally tries to mock Palin, links to an article by the Huffington Post that states that Palin "misquoted" a story in the Wall Street Journal. However, if you wade through the article and past the liberal slant, you would realize that Mrs. Palin is telling the truth. If you read the article, Palin stated that...

For many Republicans, the bright, golden haze of Election Day is marred by a thunderhead on the horizon -- the increasingly erratic political interventions of Sarah Palin. In the past, Palin embodied the populist style of the Tea Party movement while espousing a fairly mainstream Republican ideology. On economic, social and foreign policy, Palin seldom strayed from a simplified, popularized Reaganism. The mama grizzly may have been ferocious, but her talking points came from the Heritage Foundation instead of from darker corners of the right. But this election season has called that perception into question. Palin's endorsement of Christine O'Donnell...

With Sarah Palin denouncing my colleagues for veiling the Republicans who want to stop her in anonymity, POLITICO executive editor Jim VandeHei responds: We have promised since the earliest days of POLITICO to pull back the curtain on how Washington really works and to let readers inside the conversations taking place among the people in power. Sometimes that requires extensive use of anonymous sources. This is what GOP insiders in this city are talking about and their concerns are widely known, if not publicly discussed. None of these Republicans would speak on the record for obvious reasons: they fear the...

GOP mega-donors look toward 2012 By: Maggie Haberman and Kenneth P. Vogel October 23, 2010 05:33 PM EDT As the 2010 campaign draws to its raucous close, the Republican Party's biggest donors are slowly beginning to choose sides, with some still looking for a strong alternative to a populist conservative movement that makes them uneasy. The big New York, Texas, California and Florida donors who traditionally play a key role in choosing the GOP nominee lined up behind George W. Bush in 2000 and, largely, John McCain in 2008. This year’s early favorite appears to be Mitt Romney, donor...

In the past week, two hit pieces have been written against Governor Palin. The first was the piece by Jonathan Martin that was been thoroughly debunked as "flat out lies" by practically every source he identified by name. This was followed yesterday by a second hit piece in the New York Daily News that, hilariously, claimed that it will be Governor Palin's fault if the GOP doesn't take back the Senate. Whitney discussed this silliness in a post last night. To Whitney's analysis I would add that the GOP establishment has no idea how thin the ice is upon which...

It's two weeks before the 2010 elections. Which means now's a fine time to start obsessing about the 2012 campaign. The next presidential race will unofficially begin on No. 3 -- the day after the midterm elections. It's possible we may not know the outcome of all the critical House and Senate races by then, and these races could determine which party controls the House and Senate. But once most of the 2010 votes are counted, the politerati will quickly pivot toward the next big thing. So let me get an early jump and tell you this: watch out for...

Howie thread for the week starting with his Sunday Boston Herald column

Piggybacking off of this Politico article on conservatives attacking RomneyCare, Jon Chait asks why in 2008, "nearly all (conservatives) were fine with Romney's health care plan." If you were reading the National Review -- which had a soft spot for Mitt -- I can see why you would have that impression, but the reality is a lot more complicated. For starters, there were a lot of conservatives who did raise issues about his health care plan, and we published a lot of them here at the Spectator. I was a frequent critic of both Romney and his health care plan,...

O'Donnell Fires Back at Personal Attacks GOP Senate candidate responds to Democrats' smear campaign on Fox News. 7 minute interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News.

Sarah Palin just offered a surprise endorsement of insurgent Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, calling in to Sean Hannity's radio show to offer her support. The news broke mainly on Twitter, after O'Donnell and Hannity tweeted it. Dave Weigel points out some back-story here: O'Donnell's campaign manager, Matt Moran, comes from the campaign of Dave Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate in upstate New York who briefly captivated people who follow special House elections when he ran a campaign, fueled party by Palin's endorsement, that eventually forced the Republican candidate out of the race and handed the seat to Democrats. It...

Even after watching her preferred candidate surprisingly triumph in Alaska’s Senate race, Sarah Palin’s home state is no sure thing for the former governor as she trails former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in a hypothetical 2012 matchup, according to a new poll. Only 17 percent of the 805 Alaska Republicans surveyed by Public Policy Polling said they would back Palin in a 2012 GOP primary, the same percentage who voiced support for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Romney led the field, garnering 20 percent. “Fortunately for Sarah Palin, Alaska decides few convention delegates, and coming more than a month after...

EXCERPT A former senior Bush aide, chief speechwriter Michael Gerson, told POLITICO last night that he supports Obama's decision. "An enormously complex and emotional issue -- but ultimately the right thing to do," Gerson said. "A president is president for every citizen, including every Muslim citizen. Obama is correct that the way to marginalize radicalism is to respect the best traditions of Islam and protect the religious liberty of Muslim Americans. It is radicals who imagine an American war on Islam. But our conflict is with the radicals alone."

..."For all Sarah Palin's nationwide recognition, the first name in Alaskan Republican politics is still Murkowski. Actually, it's Lisa. For all Sarah Palin's nationwide recognition, the first name in Alaskan Republican politics is still Murkowski. Actually, it's Lisa. But Palin, who took the governor's mansion from Murkowski's father only to prematurely relinquish it last year, finds Murkowski lacking. Despite Murkowski's "mama grizzly" cred as a mother of two teenage boys and the state's most prominent female official, Palin upset the Republican establishment in June by instead endorsing Joe Miller, a stubble-cheeked and baritone-voiced conservative who is good buds with her...

One of the delights about the Internet is watching new people use a new technology to make the same old mistakes. Consider the admissions by Politico and Greg Sargent that they regularly run items on Sarah Palin simply to drive traffic. From Politico: “More traffic comes from an item on Sarah Palin’s ‘refudiation’ faux pas than from our hundreds of stories on the complexities of health care reform or Wall Street regulation.” Perhaps if Politico were as vigilant in its coverage of health care reform and Wall Street regulation as it is every slip by Sarah Palin readers would be...