Sarah Palin

7 Responses to Sarah Palin

1. Steel Phoenix says:

   July 12, 2009 at 2:47 pm

   I’ve never found Palin worthy of much notice. She was going for the sympathy vote, which includes a chunk of starry eyed evangelicals, but not much more. The Paleocons and Libertarians would never follow her.

   Swarzenegger found out in a hurry that big muscles don’t help you much in politics; the barracuda would have found out the same about her attitude.

   On the other hand, Palin is doing exactly what Bill Clinton should have. Had he stepped down when his scandal hit, he would have likely handed Gore the next election, since it was his personal failings rather than his policies which lost him public opinion. By stepping aside, she gives her Lt. Governor a big boost in the coming election.

   I don’t think she is a quitter, I think she is keeping her options open, but likely will find few. I’m not a big believer that you need a certain level of experience to be president, but if she couldn’t even handle a few softballs from Katie Couric, she is blatantly not qualified. Sure, she got hit with plenty of gotcha questions, as did everyone else. McCain, Obama, or Ron Paul wouldn’t have stumbled on any of them.

   Her intelligence, knowledge, and ethics are all heavily in question. I fail to see the appeal.

   She said the other day that the world needs more babies like Trig, not less. That’s pretty screwed up. Should we be searching for a way to cause Down syndrome in kids?

   I’m quite certain that if one of her rivals had stepped down mid-term, she would be the first to incite a media firestorm of false outrage. She gets no sympathy from me.
2. Gherald L says:

   July 12, 2009 at 7:54 pm

   Slow news day? Not sure what you’re expecting to get with this. Aren’t we fed up enough with Palin? Well, I can’t improve on Peggy Noonan’s epitaph. Or Barry Blitt’s cartoon.

   I reckon she’ll remain a highly polarizing figure, heroine to low-brow faux-populist conservatives, seen as a liability by everyone else. Maybe she’ll campaign with Republicans who want to shore up support with the base. Maybe she’ll be the dumber, more folksy version of Ann Coulter. About the best she could manage is hosting her own right-wing talk show.
3. Ploni Almoni says:

   July 12, 2009 at 10:52 pm

   I fell for her head over heels at first. (No, not because of her looks – I don’t think square-jawed women are all that attractive – think Maria Shriver – though Palin’s definitely sexy.) At first the media were talking about her being a former Buchananite, which seemed like a dream come true. My hope was that she’d be a vice-presidential culture warrior of the sort that Dan Quayle tried to become, but couldn’t because he was a preppy-looking white man. Culture is way more important than politics. If only there were someone who could speak the unspeakable so that, by virtue of her office, the media would be forced to cover it…. But Palin turned out to be just a typical Republican “conservative” mouthing the party line. By the time she affirmed the John McCain line on immigration during the campaign, I realized it was hopeless.

   Frum et al. are correct of course that she’s totally unqualified to be President. For the same reason Bush was, I would add. Each is reasonably intelligent, each might be qualified to be a good governor, but unlike Obama, Palin and Bush are just unable or unwilling to imagine anything outside of their liberal American ideology. The result is a disastrous foreign policy. Correct ideology can compensate a lot for lack of imagination and judgment, because (despite some campaign ads) the decisions made by the President at 3:00pm are generally more important than those made at 3:00am. But when you’ve got bad ideology and lack of imagination together – forget it.
4. ppnl says:

   July 13, 2009 at 5:40 am

   I think Palin was compromised by her own supporters. The religious right went for her and she went with the flow. This was toxic to her appeal to independents and nonreligious. It has destroyed her as a national candidate.

   The same thing is happening to the republican party as a whole. In a recent thread over at Darwin central I learned that there was much support for a republican candidate simply lying about being a creationist in order to get elected and defeat the evil liberal conspiracy. Sorry but I just can’t go there. Every religious voter you gain only makes a one vote swing. Every independent or nonreligious voter you alienate is a two vote swing. And its just wrong.

   In a sense Palin is the last bitter fruit of the southern strategy.
5. TrueNorth says:

   July 13, 2009 at 3:21 pm

   I like Sarah Palin. She wasn’t ready for the job this time around – though she gave it her best shot. Her speech at the convention was one of the most enjoyable and electrifying that I have ever heard.

   If she seriously wants to try for the presidency at some point she has to study foreign policy and other issues at the national level which so far she hasn’t been involved with as the governor of a small, rather isolated state. I am generally in agreement with John O’Sullivan and Charles Krauthammer about her prospects.

   Is she smart enough to be president? Of course. Her regrettably awful interviews with Katie Couric do not indicate stupidity; merely a lack of knowledge about the subject matter and an inability (or perhaps disinclination) to spout the kind of BS that a Joe Biden would have no trouble producing. Verbal facility is I think very loosely related to actual mental ability, though it certainly is a useful thing for any politician to acquire. John Kennedy had it. George W. Bush didn’t. Both, reputedly, had the same IQ of 119.

   Whether or not Sarah Palin decides to go for the presidency she remains one of the most endearingly authentic people on the national stage. McCain’s handlers unfortunately tarnished this a little, making inflated claims about her record. Palin certainly went along with them too, which was a mistake. I think if she remains true to herself she can go as far as she wants.
6. TangoMan says:

   July 14, 2009 at 11:08 pm

   I don’t recall any other political has-been, who committed career suicide, getting Moveon.Org to issue an alert bulletin to its members pleading for donations so that it can run advertising to counter the words of a drooling idiot who is a laughingstock to most Americans.

   What are they doing this for? Aren’t her arguments sufficiently asinine that they expose her to well-deserved ridicule?
7. Susan says:

   July 15, 2009 at 6:40 am

   Good point. I’d be interested to know if the MoveOn ad has just popped up in response to her Washington Post op-ed piece yesterday, or whether it’s been running for a while.

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