Kingmaker Palin
Posted by: Jonathan Garthwaite at 5:15 PM July 3, 2009
Other than Rush Limbaugh, who doesn't fly from state to state doing campaign events, is there a more popular conservative Republican than Sarah Palin? Nobody draws bigger crowds, raises more money and energizes activist more than Palin.If she's really done as a candidate, we may find out she ends up having a greater impact as an activist, prolific speaker and fundraiser for conservative causes than she would have had as a candidate.
She's stepped aside for now for the good of her family. Let the kids grow up in a hopefully normal world free of the vicious attacks from the likes of David Letterman and the crazed left wing nuts who will without hesitation destroy her family to destroy her.
One day the kids will be older and Sarah Palin will still be young and vigorous and perhaps ready to reenter the presidential sweepstakes.
Good mother. Right move.
UPDATE: Mark Steyn agrees, but makes a broader philosophical observation that may well be correct though depressing:
Cutting bait
With respect to many of the Palinologists below, I think they're getting way too hepatomantic over the entrails.As a political move for anything other than the 2010 Senate race, today's announcement is a disaster. And I'm not sure it's a plus for the Senate - and, even if it were, the manner and timing suggest it was not a professionally planned event and therefore is unlikely to have any grand strategy behind it.
So Occam's Razor leaves us with: Who needs this?
In states far from the national spotlight, politics still attracts normal people. You're a mayor or a state senator or even the governor, but you lead a normal life. The local media are tough on you, but they know you, they live where you live, they're tough on the real you, not on some caricature cooked up by a malign alliance of late-night comics who'd never heard of you a week earlier and media grandees supposedly on your own side who pronounce you a "cancer".
Then suddenly you get the call from Washington. You know it'll mean Secret Service, and speechwriters, and minders vetting your wardrobe. But nobody said it would mean a mainstream network comedy host doing statutory rape gags about your 14-year old daughter. You've got a special-needs kid and a son in Iraq and a daughter who's given you your first grandchild in less than ideal circumstances. That would be enough for most of us. But the special-needs kid and the daughter and most everyone else you love are a national joke, and the PC enforcers are entirely cool with it.
Most of those who sneer at Sarah Palin have no desire to live her life. But why not try to - what's the word? - "empathize"? If you like Wasilla and hunting and snowmachining and moose stew and politics, is the last worth giving up everything else in the hopes that one day David Letterman and Maureen Dowd might decide Trig and Bristol and the rest are sufficiently non-risible to enable you to prosper in their world? And, putting aside the odds, would you really like to be the person you'd have to turn into under that scenario?
National office will dwindle down to the unhealthily singleminded (Clinton, Obama), the timeserving emirs of Incumbistan (Biden, McCain) and dynastic heirs (Bush). Our loss.
