I have been consistently and persistently amazed for much of the last year over the fact that so many people seem to think Sarah Palin is not running for President.
It’s seemed transparently obvious to me since the day she resigned the Governor’s office that she was throwing her hat in the ring. She has of course not officially said she’s running, but that’s sort of like a guy who opens a garage and takes money every day to fix people’s cars but who says he hasn’t decided to open a business yet.
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I am sure governor Palin already has a lead over any other Republican for the US presidential race in 2012. She’s not part of anyone else’s stumbling national campaign now. And she is answerable to nobody.
And unless president Obama gets his national mojo working for him and us, he will be another one-term president like Hoover, Ford, Carter and Bush 41, dumped by our admittedly fickle voters.
And if my assumptions stated above are correct, there would be strong likelihood of a president Sarah Palin.
Why not? We never had a woman president, nor anyone from Alaska.
As I have written before on DW; she certainly has a lot of policies that I strongly disagree with. But I sense in her overwhelming straight-forwardness and courage that I haven’t seen in national government here since Harry S Truman boarded the train back to Independence, Missouri on I-Like-Ike’s first inaugural day. And character in its own right is at least as important to me as policy specifics.
One more thing I sense in this marvelous woman. She will make her own decisions and she will never allow a pack of advisors to shove her around or maneuver her into this or that political expediency.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I don’t think she’s running.
Of course, she has to give the impression she is (or at least not give the impression that she isn’t) in order to keep expanding her base of support — to sell more books, to have a bigger say in who does run, etc, etc.
If she declared she wasn’t running, her support, hype, money, would soon dry up.
–HB
Hank, I think Sarah Palin is running for president. There’s not a coy or disingenuous bone in that woman’s body. She’s almost exactly like the Harry S Truman that I remember from more than 60 years ago. She says what she means and means what she says.
The whole world can see that the balloon of Obama’s presidency is deflating almost as we watch it. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, has gained tremendously in public stature ever since the election last year which cut her loose from McCain’s lost-before-he-started campaign. Her crowd trusts her. And despite my policy differences, I’m part of her crowd. There are not many politicians I ever have trusted. But I trust her, and I like her.
The fact is, her popularity is growing as Obama’s is shrinking. Even now, three years before the next presidential election, she has become a political phenomenon similar to what occured with Obama during George W Bush’s second term. If she keeps this up — and I am sure she will keep it up — no Republican will be able even to lay a glove on her 24 months from now.
And unless something changes the political calculus of the USA in less than three years, I think she will be the Republican candidate and I also think she will beat Obama in the general election. Unless he drops out. Which is not likely because the liberal wing of his party now runs the show, and they neither can nor will dump their liberal leader.
As for the background music to this opera: The economy of this country is about as dead as it can get. There is no general agreement about national health care reform. We are still at war, and even conservatives are questioning why we are still in Afghanistan. Our industrial base has been lost to China, Japan, and even Mexico. There is hardly a state or local government that is not floundering in debts that cannot be recouped from taxes, because the taxes themselves are dependent on an expanding economy that we probably will not see for a while.
So look at it this way. America wanted a change in November 2008. And undeniably the threat of change is exactly what they have gotten, but they don’t like what they see. Meantime, most of the country is getting tired of the elitists who now seem to be in charge of our lives.
The kind of change that Sarah Palin represents will be what another president 90 years ago called a “return to normalcy”.
I also think she’s a quick study who never makes the same mistake twice. Which means there will be no more extended interview series with people like Charlie Gibson or the assortment of ugly and vicious news-hens whom nobody watches on television anymore. And what in hell does she need the liberal media for? She is the one making the news, and they need her more than she needs them. But she is the kind of person who knows how to connect directly with the masses of people, and for that, she has no need of any news media connections at all.
As for her support, hype, money drying up, I say dream on, Hank. The Republicans shaping up for 2012 want a winner, not one of the tired faces from yesteryear. In any case, national elections these years are something you begin preparing for the day after the last election. Very shortly, she will have energized all the support she would wish for, and then some.
I knew the moment I saw her on television for the first time, when McCain introduced her to America, that she would become the One.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
She has many good qualities and has seemed to catch “lightning in a bottle”, which happened to McCain in 2000 and Obama in 2008.
But, the bottom line is her policy prescriptions, not all this hype.
I’ll betcha lunch she doesn’t run for President.
–HB
So where exactly where do you live, Hank? I can afford to buy you lunch; but not to travel long distances to do it.
I’m in Dane County in southern Wisconsin.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
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