If Sarah Palin indeed is planning on running for president, her abrupt withdrawal from her job as governor of Alaska seems a strange way to do it.
But even stranger is her explanation of why. According to her own account, she decided first that she wouldn't run for re-election. That's reasonable enough — once the GOP presidential contest begins in earnest after the 2010 elections she'd be free to devote her time to the context. But her explanation as to why she would then abandon her governorship only a year and a half into her term just doesn't pass the smell test (or any other test).
As she put it, once she announced she wouldn't seek re-election, she'd become a lame duck. That's a fair enough description. But then she described what lame ducks do — things like go on trade missions — and suggested that whatever it is that lame ducks do is a waste of taxpayers' money, so she's quitting the job in order to protect the taxpayers.
Puh-leeze.
Why not be just a bit more straightforward? No, she doesn't have to be this straightforward: "I like the attention of being on the national political stage and don't like the nitty-gritty of running a state government in a state that nobody pays attention to." But even something like this would have been a more believable explanation: "My run for the vice presidency has given me a passion to make a difference for the United States, and I'd rather devote my energies to making not just Alaska better, but the whole country."
At least that would have been credible. Palin has some big leaps to make if she's ever going to be taken seriously by anyone but her admirers, and this doesn't help.
2 comments:
Palin’s move just puts all the more pressure on Obama to finally get some results, as the soaring rhetoric isn’t hypnotizing the plebes like it used to. This week Helen Thomas, Colin Powell, and Warren Buffet all turned on him. Polls are looking droopy for The One lately.
Obama’s porkulus program is a train wreck, all it’s done is bump interest rates and tank the dollar. We are being laughed at by bad guys like Tehran, Pyongyang, and Al Qaida who amazingly turned-down Barack’s timid friend-requests.
Palin could trounce him in 2012, when Americans would vote for the Gipper-in-Heels in droves- while begging for lower taxes, free enterpise, a defense posture with some backbone… an end to the radical, anti-American nightmare we’ve got now.
Go get ‘em Sarah-
http://reaganiterepublicanresistance.blogspot.com
Before Palin can put pressure on Obama, she has to be taken seriously by more than her hard-core fans. I don't see that happening yet.
But I agree with you to the extent that Obama needs to show positive results with his administration well before 2012. True, he entered his term in a terrible situation, but he also set expectations very high and needs to show more than talk. If he doesn't, any Republican, even Sarah Palin, will be able to defeat him.
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