George Will has an interesting column today on Sarah Palin and “America’s durable but shallow reservoir of populism”:
The Republican presidential nominee, an Arizona senator, was a maverick, which was part of his charm. He spoke and acted impulsively, which was part of his problem. Voters thought his entertaining dimensions might be incompatible with presidential responsibilities. For example, he selected a running mate most Americans had never heard of and who had negligible experience pertinent to the presidency. This was 1964.
Barry Goldwater, whose seat John McCain occupies, chose to run with Bill Miller, a congressman from Lockport, N.Y., near Buffalo. Miller, Goldwater cheerfully explained, annoyed Lyndon Johnson. After the Goldwater-Miller ticket lost 44 states, Miller retired to Lockport, where he practiced law and lived in dignified anonymity until his death in 1983. Although he had served as an assistant prosecutor of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg and spent seven terms in Congress, no one suggested he should be considered for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination.
Yet Sarah Palin, who with 17 months remaining in her single term as Alaska’s governor quit the only serious office she has ever held, is obsessively discussed as a possible candidate in 2012. Why? She is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states.
February 18th, 2010 | 3:41 pm
I’ve always seen Palin’s attraction as, “She hates the same people I hate, and she’s the only one in the country with a pulpit to say it from.”
I like her for that but she doesn’t have much else to offer. Pretty sure most of her fans know it as well.
February 18th, 2010 | 4:40 pm
I see similarities between Palin and Reagan. He rode a wave of anger and frustration into office. He was an appealing candidate, a convincing speaker, and the media always thought he was not very bright. If you recall Palin’s speech the night John McCain introduced her as his running mate, and her acceptance speech at the convention, you know she can energize and connect with the people. In fact, she’s better at it than Obama. Bottom line: They’re saying the same things about her that they said about Reagan.
February 18th, 2010 | 4:56 pm
I pretty much agree with John C., but frankly I see her role more as a reminder to the elites that there are a lot of “plain people” in this land who have lives and hopes and dreams, and see that the establishment is essentially bankrupting their future. And, if nothing else, at least she annoys the heck out of the George Willses and David Brookses of the world.
February 18th, 2010 | 7:10 pm
For well over a year, since Governor Palin gained national attention, I have watched the media, the punditry, the political class, academia, and every other group of elitist shills go after her like ravenous wolves. It has been a sight to behold. Yet I can find no reason for this abject hatred, other than that these shills sense that she is a winner. And that is where I’ll place my bet. Whenever I hear some Palin-hater (from the right) make a snide remark about her “inelectability”, I consider that there is no one else on the radar that can match what she offers; not Romney, not Pawlenty, not Gingrich, literally NO ONE! So I conclude, and tell the Palin-haters, well, if you don’t like Palin, then vote for Hussein.
Its likely that they did before, anyway…
February 18th, 2010 | 10:20 pm
I agree with blackelkspeaks. I have always thought Sarah was great, and it has been a great mystery to me why the elites hate her so much. She needs to bone up on issues and policy, present a consistent message, and she’ll be a great candidate. And she needs to avoid becoming too much of a “celebrity”. I supported Romney during the last campaign, and I think he would make a fine President; but unfortunately we live in a time when a solid, sensible, intelligent man hasn’t got a chance. Go for it, Sarah!
February 18th, 2010 | 10:48 pm
George Will and Co. are mistaking the affectations of intellectual ability; proper accents, proper attitudes, fashionable opinions, for the real thing. We all recently learned of President Obama’s facility with affectation when speaking to black American’s. All the right people chuckled about his dexterous communication abilities. For some reason it didn’t occur to them that he might be doing the same thing when speaking to them.
George Will and his fellow club members prefer this kind of fashionable intellectualism to the real thing. In the world of the twenty first century American intellectual class it is more important to hold right opinions than to be right. In these lofty circles ad hominem has become reason, credentials, of the credentialed, from the proper credentialling institutions more important than evidence, strongly held opinions, about subjects with which the opiner is little, or not at all familiar, the norm.
Gov. Palin eschews such pretensions. She is more interested in communicating than impressing. She is more interested in speaking plainly than in demonstrating her intellectual ability.
People like Will have great confidence in the ability of properly credentialed technocrats to make all the right decisions. We were told repeatedly that the smartest people in the world were running Wall Street. People so smart that they were able to develop mathematical algorithms incomprehensible to ordinary men. We were assured that these mathemagical formulas would turn straw into gold. To many ordinary people it did not make sense, but we were assured it was so.
We were told to bow before the genius of climatologists, who we were assured even by conservative intellectuals were beyond petty personal motives. They were SCIENTISTS and they must be believed. Anyone who questioned them must shut up.
Sarah Palin refers not to her superior intellect but to our common sense. She appeals not to fashionable authority but to evidence. She presents herself not as a technocratic genius with magical answers to difficult problems but as a leader pointing us back to imperfect but proven solutions.
As my wife the first grade teacher said, “If they hate Sarah Palin this much they must hate me too.”
February 19th, 2010 | 1:04 am
“George Will has an interesting column today….”
Beg your pardon?! George Will has not had an interesting column in years. Perhaps back when the Clintons were co-Presidents. And his comments on Governor Palin seem to indicate that, once again, he needs to wear sans-a-belt or suspenders.
February 19th, 2010 | 7:59 am
I’m another one of those conservatives that doesn’t see it with Mrs. Palin. All things considered, she really hasn’t done that much that in my mind would that qualify her for the job of president. Oh, she’s got some stuff on her resume there, to be sure. But the one real, truly potential job in terms of preparing her was the job she quit. You can argue she needed to quit to pay her bills that resulted from her running for VP, but she choose to run for VP knowing full well that she would be ravaged by the opposition. So, tell me, if she quit that job when it became difficult, what makes folks think she won’t quit her next one? Especially considering the fact that the presidency puts so much more pressure on a person. Mind you, should she get the job I don’t see her quitting, but I do wonder how the pressure would affect her, knowing that she couldn’t deal with it and stick to her commitment in the past.
She’s not Reagan. Reagan wasn’t a quitter. Reagan did much bigger things prior to becoming president and had a much better defined philosophy of governing as well. To be sure it was also much more mature. Reagan, maybe because he was so much older, had clearly thought much, much more about governance than Mrs. Palin. Sure, I’m for lower taxes and smaller government, just like Mrs. Palin, but there’s so much more to governing than that. Yet those seem to pretty much be her two staples. And Reagan was a man who came at you from a positive perspective; Mrs. Palin tickles us from the negative. It is simply not the same. There’s much I like about Mrs. Palin, but I do not think her presidential timber.
February 19th, 2010 | 8:56 am
She needs to bone up on issues and policy, present a consistent message, and she’ll be a great candidate.
That’s the problem. Until she does that, it is premature to consider her a candidate of any kind, let alone a great one. Does she show any signs of actually boning up on issues and policy? Crib sheets on the palm of her hand don’t count.
February 19th, 2010 | 9:44 am
I do not think Sarah Palin is qualified to be president. I did think she was qualified to be vice president, however, far more qualified to be vice president than Obama was to be president. QED.
I’ve spoken to several liberal acquaintances about why they hate her so much, and they don’t have a rational answer. They hate something she represents, and I think it is the American people. They like Americans as they wish them to be, not as they are (or as they THINK the American people are), and that’s why they want to remake the entire country.
February 19th, 2010 | 11:31 am
I think Will has read too much of the textbooks and lost his perception about the reality. Palin has demonstrated she has more streetsmart than many of the academics. She has more impact on America than as governor of Alaska. This is not a negative. Will dwells too much into the 60′s and forget that America has enormously changed politically because of the 24/7 news cycle. Sure, Palin may not be the President in 2012, but she could be a good candidate in 2016 or beyond, if she can reinvent her image to that generation. We should not dismiss her lightly. Will, like others has under-estimated Palin.
February 19th, 2010 | 11:49 am
Many people step into the political spotlight who can fall at various places along the continuum of “qualified to be president:” Howard Dean, Dan Quayle, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Geraldine Ferraro. Where Sarah Palin falls along that continuum is certainly a valid topic of debate. But the venom that has been poured out on her from those on the right and the left cannot be simply attributed to the fact that these “Sarah-haters” just think she is unqualified. After all, if a large number of people believe that, an unqualifed candidate will simply not win. Game over. The utter hate-filled contempt is addressing something else, and I think most of that is an elitist, degree-fetishists dislike of the American people that these elitists see Sarah Palin as representing. A great look at this is on National Review Online today:
http://article.nationalreview.com/425484/palin-populism/michael-knox-beran
February 19th, 2010 | 12:07 pm
>>You can argue she needed to quit to pay her bills that resulted from her running for VP…>>
That isn’t what she said about why she quit. She said that the reason was that so many suits were being filed against her (by liberals in Alaska), that she had no time to do her job as governor of Alaska. In Alaska, apparently, you can file a suit against a sitting governor and it will proceed while that governor is still if office.
Would you have recommended that she not answer the suits? What would have been the outcome?
In any case, she felt that her LT Governor could handle the position of Governor and wouldn’t be hassled by lawsuits – which has apparently turned out to be the case. On the other hand, you could say that those who were harrassing her with lawsuits won – since they succeeded in hounding her out of office. I don’t believe any of the cases are currently active – they’ve been dropped. That should tell you something…
February 19th, 2010 | 1:43 pm
Suek:
Some quotes from the day she announced she was leaving office:
___
Palin added in a statement that she was “determined to take the right path for Alaska even though it is not the easiest path. … Once I decided not to run for re-election, I also felt that to embrace the conventional lame duck status in this particular climate would just be another dose of politics as usual, something I campaigned against and will always oppose.”
___
A Republican source close to her political team told CNN’s John King that it was a “calculation” she made that “it was time to move on.” The governor’s “book deal and other issues” were “causing a lot of friction” in her home state, the source said, adding that he believes that she is “mapping out a path to 2012.”
___
Randy Ruedrich, chairman of Alaska’s Republican Party, said he “was not even contemplating her stepping down.”
Ruedrich said he recently met with members of Palin’s staff to discuss her re-election plans.
He said he told them that it would be good if she made her decision by October for fund-raising purposes, rather than wait until June 2010, the legal deadline to commit to an election run. He said he anticipated that she would run for the seat again and was surprised today to learn otherwise.
___
Republican strategist and CNN contributor Ed Rollins said that, to a certain extent, Palin’s announcement makes her look “terribly inept.”
“I think everyone is shocked by this, and I think to a certain extent everyone is going to assume there’s another story. You don’t just quit with a year and a half to go. You certainly don’t do this as a stepping stone to run for president. You finish the job that you’re in, and obviously she’s not doing that,” he said.
___
However, CNN Republican strategist Mary Matalin said she thought the move was “really brilliant” on Palin’s part, though she admitted she was surprised when she heard the news.
“Her delivery was incredible. If you’re a less charismatic person, you probably couldn’t pull it off,” Matalin said. “[Now] she will be freed up and liberated the way Mitt Romney is to raise money and get political chips by spending it and getting political capital. And she is still raising the kinds of crowds and money she always did.”
Now, Matalin says, Palin must focus on “putting up with the conventional wisdom” that this was a bad move and travel the country to drum up support for a presidential run.
“She takes that target off her back with a good record to launch from,” Matalin said.
___
I looked to see if I could find an article stating what you said, Suek, but couldn’t. I did see stuff that came out later, but she herself didn’t seem to say this the day she announced. Bottom line: she quit.
February 19th, 2010 | 3:06 pm
To suek and Bibbit:
Sorry, Bibbit (like Billy Bibbit, the guy from “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” who killed himself?) but suek is absolutely right.
All you have to do is type “why palin resigned” into any search engine. You’ll be sure to find references to many, many articles and interviews with Governor Palin herself (as I just did using Yahoo!) that unequivocally proves that the litigation tsunami she had to endure from her Democrat opponents and the subsequent financial burden and operational restrictions as Governor she was forced to confront led her to “quit”. She even said, many times, that she did not then, nor intends to now, continue with “politics as usual”.
This is why I believe she will ultimately confound the elitists of all stripes (such as the George Will’s of the world, even the Romney’s and Gingrich’s) who cannot conceive of a strategy that does end runs around the hidebound and myopic tactics of yesteryear.
I unabashedly predict that Sarah Palin will be elected President in 2012. Bet on it!
February 19th, 2010 | 3:59 pm
Talking about academic degrees. It looks like the political science degree from Harvard has deflated quite a bit when Mr. Obama’s ability is analyzed. Frankly, many of the academic pundits are not that much more enlightening. Talking about a good logical reasoning and thinking straight, they have not shown much on Palin lately. Prove me wrong.
February 20th, 2010 | 11:51 am
Its interesting to hear those defending Palin refer to intellectualism as holding “proper accents” or “popular opinions.” This is not what Will is referring to by intellectual ability, and assuming he does reveales ones own limitations.
The best part of the article was his honesty that she will never be President. As a voter very unhappy with our current President, and more prone to like people like Palin on a personal level: I thank God she will never be President. Too bad others aren’t more honest about that (Fox News comes to mind.)
February 20th, 2010 | 6:30 pm
Josh: You said, “The best part of the article was his honesty that she will never be President.” It’s not clear to me what you mean by his honesty. Has Will travelled to the future and observed that this is the case?
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