The Gov. Palin resignation

Ok so maybe the Sarah Palin wave has swept through already...and then again maybe not. At least it seems to have knocked Michael Jackson off of the top of the news stories.

I just am amazed at all the talking heads, bloggers and chatterboxes who keep wanting to find something deeper and deeper to this announcement.

OK maybe there is some grand plan to her resignation. But then again... Perhaps she is just tired of seeing her family as the targets of the hate-filled moonbats and their childish attacks.

I mean could anyone at all blame her? I know I would end up getting pretty pissed off if people were putting pictures of my down syndrome son up all over the internet and making "retard" jokes about my family. Way to stay classy left.

This is a good case study in the way that liberal/progressives think and how they can be completely out of touch with ordinary people. To the liberal chatterboxes EVERYTHING is about politics. It is just too much for them to think that someone might actually leave politics altogether and do something that is not politically motivated.

I really don't know what Palin has in mind but then again I would not be surprised, or disappointed, if she simply wanted to get her and her family out of the spotlight. Go out and make some money on the speaking tour to pay off her legal debts (Debts caused by the many and sundry empty ethics charges. Charges she has been cleared on over and over and over.)

And of course it is funny how those who were predicting some "scandal" are primarily doing it anonymously. Don't do it here unless you are willing to place your name on the scandal prediction.

Victor Davis Hanson has a great write up of "writing Sarah off" over here.

Conventional wisdom suggests that short-term the Palin decision was unwise — e.g., "quitter," unpredictable, sulking, etc. But what else are her critics really going to say? It's not like a Letterman can trump laughing at her on late-night television as he puns that a Yankees star had sex in a dugout with her 14-year old daughter. Can Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic website go beyond his slurs that she did not deliver her own child? How much more cleverly can N.Y. feminist pundits tsk-tsk her that she's a Wasilla trailer-park retread?

In other words, it doesn't matter that much what critics say, but — should she pursue politics — only what she does with her newfound time, especially if she travels widely, studies foreign policy, and helps galvanize the party base.

In the long run, she can lecture, earn a good income through speaking, develop a coterie of advisers and supporters, take care of her family, not have the constant political warring on all flanks, and invest time in reflecting and studying issues, visit the country, meet leaders, etc. She's not looking at 2012; but in eight years by 2016 she will be far more savvy, still young, and far more experienced. It matters not all that the Left writes her off as daffy, since they were going to do that whatever she did; the key is whether she convinces conservatives in eight year of travel and reflection that she's a charismatic Margaret Thatcher type heavyweight.

And Steve Hayward reminds everyone that Ronald Reagan was written off several times.

Newsweek, 1971, “Ronald Reagan’s Slow Fade,” ended with the judgment that “the somber truth is that Sacramento may mark the end of Ronald Reagan’s political road. . . By every normal measure, Ronald Reagan ought to be entitled to any political future he wants. A close aide said, 'The Presidency? Oh, he’s not interested. Four more years and I think you’ll see Ronald Reagan riding one of his horses off into the sunset.'” And see Stephen Roberts in the New York Times Magazine: “In 1976, the reasoning goes, Reagan would be 65, and too old to run.” “When a guy’s built on celluloid,” Democratic State Senator George Moscone said, “he goes up fast, but he burns out quickly.”

After the 1976 campaign, Newsweek offered a reprise, “Into the Sunset": "The concluding line of Reagan’s convention speech—'There is no substitute for victory'—could also turn out to be a epitaph for his own political career."

And not to be left out, John Coyne wrote in some magazine called National Review that "Reagan seems somewhat out of step with the new political stirrings, a man very much of the Sixties. . . For a decade he has been a central symbol of everything that is best in what we call the conservative movement, and if his approach and his ideas are obsolete, then so are those many of us who believe in him. And it’s never much fun to be a middle-aged anachronism."

Granted, Sarah Palin is not Ronald Reagan. But then again before Reagan there was no Reagan.

Ultimately folks need to take a breath and chill out. Some people thought I was crazy to get out of politics and move my family back to a small town in eastern Washington.

Could it be that there is some grand plan to Palin's move? Maybe, maybe not. And if there is I am not ready to completely write her off either. There is a reason that first time scenarios are, well... first time scenarios.

Who would have thought that a no name peanut farmer would become president? Ronald Reagan was written off over and over and was actually fought against by people in his own party.

Who would have thought that a black half term US Senator who's middle name is Hussien would become president?

Finally I hope you join me in ignoring ANYTHING that Mike Huckabbee has to say about this. Knowing full well that the Huckster wants to run for president himself and will say anything he can that will position himself closer to that goal.

Meanwhile Mary Matalin and Bill Kristol believe that if she wants to run for higher office this may be a very shrewd move. A "gamble?" Sure. But then again if one did want to run for higher office isn't that move alone rife with gambles?



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