I see that, while she’s wildly popular with a large chunk of the GOP base, the general public doesn’t have a very good view of Governor Palin.
Obviously, there’s a certain subset on the left with a visceral hatred for the woman, so that’s going to be part of this number. Another is going to be that politicians are always in bad odor with the public, and these days with the economy bad they will be particularly so.
Still, despite her wild popularity with Evangelicals (thus pretty much ruining Mike Huckabee’s chances) and a few other conservatives, I think she’s going to have a tough time winning the Republican nomination. All those criticisms that you hear about her lack of experience and such? They really do have some bite; it was all well and good to say “well she had more experience than Obama!” but that worked better when she was on the Veep slot. You can fully expect her Republican opponents to attack her on experience, flubs, and more once the race actually begins. And I honestly think she’d have a very hard time with the general electorate. Maybe not, but we’ll see.
For the record, it would be almost impossible for me to vote for her. She’s got the right mentality on national defense issues but on domestic economic matters I strongly disagree with too many of her positions. Although there’s many a change to a politician between getting the nomination and running int he general election…
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Palin isn’t going to run for the White House. She doesn’t want it.
So, not that the polls really matter (I mean, if they did, ObamaCare wouldn’t have passed), who gives a rip what the polls say?
Oh, that’s right, the people who hate her. Goody for them.
I’m an acknowledged Palin fan and have defended her vigorously against the vicious hate-filled attacks from the deranged left, but she is not doing the things I hoped she would, and her prospects aren’t improving for becoming either a politician or a serious conservative leader. She still has the opportunity, but she hasn’t done nearly as much withit as I hoped she would.
All things considered, I suppose I could be classified as part of the deranged center. Unlike Dean, who seems to dislike Evangelicals, I’m particularly fond of them, in that I have signed the online petitions of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), one of their major political efforts, and I intend to donate to them.
Support former governor Sarah Palin for US president? I surely would be more comfortable with Sarah as president than I ever could have been comfortable with Barack Hussein Obama as president, whom I did not even vote for.
But don’t get any overextended ideas about me. I like her personally, not the teabag crowd. (I like coffee, I can’t stand tea, and my favorite coffee is brewed up fresh each day at EVP Coffee Houses in Madison, WI. I’m politically inconsistent, but about my issues, I’m one of the most consistent people I know.
I guess you could call me a radical regionalist. (You’ll all have to think about what I mean by that, but if any of you had ever read my stuff about regional planning (transportation/transit, land use, farmland/open spaces preservation, environmental protection of land/water resources) in Dane County, Wisconsin, you would know exactly where I’m coming from and, hopefully, going.
I’m also a hardcorps member of the organized gun owners, and I favor using the US armed forces to guard our southern borders, and I want them to shoot dead anyone who crosses the deadline heading north (anyone who escape the anti-personnel mines and the machine gun fire gets turned over to Sheriff Joe Arpaio for part of his concentration camp population); and I want to reindustrialize this country along the idea lines of Patrick Buchanan.
Finally, considering that the only growth industries in Wisconsin are state prisons and methamphetamine labs, I want to empty out drug users and white collar criminals from the prisons, putting them to work and making sure they pay taxes, and I want to put to death the methlab chemists. “Dadah means death”.
As a result of all the above, neither Republicans nor Democrats in Dane County want very much to do with me.
Which is good.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Largely reposted from something I said from another site:
Generally speaking, I like Palin. While her executive experience is short, she does have some good accomplishements under her belt. To me, her problem is that she got the ball in an open field and she’s looking real flashy running around East-West, but if she plans on actually running for POTUS she needs to start running North-South and make some progress. We’ve already seen the error of electing a POTUS based on flashy.
Politically, however, she has way too much baggage. Especially from quitting the governorship. Now, I don’t blame her one bit for doing it. Her reasons for doing so were noble and valid. The attacks on her were unfair personally and professionally and were harming the state of Alaska. So I don’t think stepping down speaks ill of her character at all. It was a selfless act to help the state in both the short term (by removing obstacles) and in the long term (by giving her replacement name recognition and a proven record).
I see it as a very blatant indictment of our political system whereby we self-select for politicians who are selfish bastards.
However, none of that matters. What ought to be should not be confused with what is. And those problems won’t suddenly disappear if Palin were to run for or become POTUS. They’ll just get worse. Exponentially. Especially since she has told everyone those kind of attacks will work. When you reward something, you get more of it.
So even if she gained experience, matured politically and became the perfect candidate, if she has to spend 75% of her time mired in fighting off librarian, sheriff, and Trig conspiracies, she’ll be completely ineffectual.
Fair or not (I vote for not) she simply has too much baggage to be an effective leader in any formal capacity. Informal leadership as an opinion maker is the only viable avenue for her.
Too funny. You go on for 3 paragraphs about, well nothing and then one sentence about “I disagree with many of her domestic positions”, but can’t be bothered to say what those are, or why you disagree.
Don’t forget that an extremely large portion of her “negatives” are due to the liberal media narrative that was built to tear her to pieces because she isn’t an authentic feminist woman. Don’t believe me ? Go see her favorable numbers at Pollster.com. Her unfavorable number started at 7%. You tell me what she did or said that rocketed that up to near 50% in just 2 months. “I can see Russia from my house”, that’s what. Tina Fey said that you say ? Too bad 50% of people think Palin said it. The fact that the McCain campaign served her up on a silver platter for liberal pundits to ambush her in interview after interview didn’t help. The fact that the media did 10 times more to investigate Palin than Obama was real nifty, too.
Besides which, its currently 2010. I wish people would quit worrying about who is or is not going to be a nominee two years from now.
Disagreeing with Evangelicals firmly on theological grounds is not disliking them. Nevertheless it shouldn’t be surprising that such disagreements can be as strong as any political argument ever gets.
On political matters, it’s fascinating to me to observe how the Evangelical vote shifted; right up until the 1970s, most Evangelicals either stayed out of the political process or could be found pretty reliably on the left on most social issues. It’s often forgotten but Jimmy Carter was the first President to actually declare himself a “born-again Christian.” But prior to that, Evangelical involvement in politics still tended to be left of center; William Jennings Bryan was their standardbearer in politics in the late 19th and very early 20th Century. Their support for things like food stamps, medicaid, medicare, social security etc. was crucial to getting those programs passed. They were also a huge part of the Civil Rights Movement for blacks, although that’s a little more complicated as there were Evangelicals on both sides of that one–but I think that even there, there’s no denying that had it not been for the *huge* participation of Evangelicals, that movement would have floundered. (One shouldn’t have to remind people that Martin Luther King WAS a Fundamentalist Baptist, of the same basic stripe as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, although I don’t think he was ever into some of the more esoteric stuff like faith-healing that they were.)
It makes sense that this would be the case; fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity has historically been found primarily in two ethnic groups in America: poor whites, and poor blacks. That’s changed over the last few decades but historically that was where the greatest concentration of them was always found.
Three things seem to have happened to cause this seismic shift in Evangelical voting patterns; abortion, which became a national issue only in 1973 due to one Supreme Court decision, the gay rights movement, and, Communism. With Communism gone, what seems to have occurred is a shift toward fascination with Israel and a generalized belief that the modern state of Israel was foretold in scriptures and is an indicator that we are now in the End Times and coming up on something called “The Rapture,” a theology that has its roots in 19th Century American fundamentalism, most especially from the likes of Cyrus Scofield, Charles Nelson Darby,and other Dispensationalist theologians. 9/11 also seems to have caused many of these folks (some of them my friends) to shift from a concentration on Communism (which was, according to the likes of Hal Lindsey and Pat Robertson, the forces of the antichrist in the “end tiems”–at least until world Communism collapsed) to the religion of Islam as their focal-point theological enemy.
Ronald Reagan seems to have basically helped crystallize all this into a historically strange wedding between evangelicals/social conservatives and market-oriented economic conservatism. On economic issues, prior to Reagan, that’s just not where most Evangelical voters were, and it’s not clear to me that they’re going to stay there long-term.
Long story short, Sarah Palin’s extended 15 minutes of fame is the inevitable product of the collapse of conservatism as I long knew and admired it (Goldwater, Buckley, Brooke, etc.). Had it not been her it would have been someone like her to galvanize what passes for the Republican base today.
It is all so terribly sad.
With Communism gone
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Wouldn’t it be lovely to think so?
I don’t know. I just don’t see anything I like about her other than she is a Republican, which I generally like more than Democrats. I could never imagine voting for her, she really lost me when she couldn’t even answer Katie Couric’s simple questions about what publications she might read. Now that was painful.
shaun, we’ll see how sad you think the Republican base is this November.
Not in any way a Palin fan, she was still the absolute best thing about McCain-the-Presdential-candidate & was the only thing that led me to not vote for Obama.
However, the intense acrimony toward Palin (have you seen the “Palin is a Fuking Retard” facebook group?) is unwarranted, totally out of hand, and stunning. It ranks up there with BDS. She isn’t that important. And the President is at once elevating her importance, focusing attention away from analyzing his policies and towards Palin-bashing, and fanning the flames; clever sleight of hand that is promoting and exacerbating polarization of America.
Curious, do Presidents typcially attack and address people other than legislators by name? I can’t remember this being done in the past, maybe I’ve just forgotten.
P Mike, this level of thin-skinned middle-school whining is almost unheard of in a modern President. I’ve been paying close attention to the political scene for 40 years and I’ve never seen anything like it. Obama has the thinnest skin of any politician I’ve ever seen. Watch his body language, he telegraphs his attitudes and thoughts more than any trained public person I can recall, and much more than any politician I can think of.
Frankly, I’m glad she’s killing the Huckabee vote – his politics are everything I disliked about Bush (“compassionate conservatism”) and nothing I liked (strong on defense/terrorism). The religious right will have to deal with the fact that “inclusive” leftie statism is far more palatable to most of the population than a frowning, judgmental “God-centered” statism will ever be.
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