But check out Matthew Continetti's piece this morning, at the Los Angeles Times, "Palin Unveils Her Latest Persona: Her Incarnation as Sarah the Celebrity Paves the Way for Sarah the Free Marketer":
Sarah Palin has a talent for reinvention. Since her first campaign in 1992, she's gone through a wardrobe full of political personas. Study her career and you count no less than five different identities: Sarah the culture warrior, Sarah the watchdog, Sarah the reformer, Sarah the veep and now, Sarah the celebrity.RELATED: Airhead Newsweek editor Jon Meacham's non-apology for this week's sexist disgrace of a cover story attacking Sarah Palin, "Official Statement on Newsweek's Sarah Palin Cover" (via Memeorandum).
Such flexibility has allowed Palin to adapt to changing political circumstances. And in a tumultuous political moment, Palin's pragmatism is an advantage.
In fact, we are already seeing the outlines of identity number six: Sarah the free marketer. This is the identity that will be crucial if Palin decides to run for president in 2012 ....
When Palin returned to Alaska after election day, she discovered that she couldn't return to her previous identity. She was still Sarah the veep. Without Democratic support, she had no chance of moving additional reforms through the Legislature. Palin's opponents in Alaska and in the Lower 48 filed a series of frivolous ethics complaints against her. Every time she left her state, the Democrats attacked and drove up her negative ratings. In response, Palin resigned from office.
Leaving the governorship paved the way for Sarah the celebrity. In this phase, Palin is the author of a bestselling memoir. On her book tour, which will take her to places such as Grand Rapids, Mich., and Roanoke, Va., fans and well-wishers are expected to turn out in droves to see her. She has granted major interviews to Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters. And she has built a Facebook following of close to a million people. For better or worse -- OK, worse -- she's even produced a satellite celebrity in Playgirl model and future ex-reality-TV star Levi Johnston.
As Sarah the celebrity, Palin can reintroduce herself to the American people on her own terms. In the process, she will make a lot of money. Yet celebrity isn't qualification enough for high office. Fame draws eyeballs, but it doesn't get you votes. If Palin wants to run for the presidency, she also needs to be sure that the public knows her principles.
That's where Sarah the free marketer enters the picture. Palin grasps that the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress are attempting to renegotiate the American social contract. She understands that the Democrats want to increase the role that government plays in the economy and our daily lives.
Palin holds the opposite view. In her book, she talks a lot about fiscal responsibility. She recalls Ronald Reagan's approach to economic growth. In her Facebook messages to supporters, she opposes the Democratic healthcare and climate cap-and-trade bills. She favors reducing regulation and increasing competition.
Palin is reaching out to the anti-tax-and-spend "tea party" movement. She wants to integrate it into the broader GOP. In a recent special congressional election in upstate New York, she intervened and endorsed the pro-market third-party candidate, Doug Hoffman, over the liberal Republican, Dede Scozzafava.
These moves have put Palin on the cutting edge of American politics. She's comfortable as Sarah the free marketer. She's in the middle of the raucous fight over President Obama's sweeping domestic agenda. And to the delight of her fans and the dismay of her enemies, she's not going anywhere.
BONUS POST: From Legal Insurrection, "Never Missing An Excuse To Attack Trig Palin."
4 comments:
As I stated a while ago the Left will rue the day they thought they were pushing her out of office. They only made it possible for her to meet and greet a much larger slice of the American electorate.
What they will see in Palin up close and personal will be diametrically opposed to that image painted by the Left and the Media. As that works its way through to 2012 both the Left and the Media will look and sound far removed from the real image that most people will come to know.
It is easy to cast aspersions at someone if you can keep them locked into a position, such as Governor, but not so easy when people can get to meet that very same person outside those confines.
Again, the Left will rue the day when they actually gave her the platform and the megaphone to beat them around the ears. Worse yet is that they will have their own albatross hung around their neck in the person of Obama.
An intelligent and thoughtful analysis of Sarah Palin,…………… but, she is not a president in the making. I really respect Sarah Palin. I do. In fact , I find her alluring.
I even hate the liberal media attacks on her. The leftists who guard their feminist agenda, and yet, inappropriately transfers a fitness photo of her on the cover of a fitness magazine, to a political magazine, for partisan purposes. I appreciate Palin’s energy, and to me, the governor is the best training for president. I relate to her American values, and her family choices in life - her supportive husband and family…but, I do not see her as presidential material. She is no Margaret Thatcher.
Watching her on Oprah, I know she is selling her book, but, this is no president. Even the non-presidential Huckabee talk show, which I think he shouldn’t have done, Huckabee comes off with more gravitas than Sarah Palin.
We currently have a weak president. We need a strong person – female, fine, white male, fine… African-American, Latino, fine – but, what are their agendas? I really do not care about the zeitgeist need for a minority, hasn’t our white guilt played out yet? Whatever sex, or color, we are in need of a level of authority that presumes American exceptionalism. We need a strong person! A president that will deal with the foreign policy issues, head on; the economy without disingenuous slight of hand that are meaningless - Health Care in the trillions, yet we will “lower the deficit?” like a Houdini act? Obsequious behavior to our enemies? We need someone of consequence…right now We need someone of substance – Teddy Roosevelt – I would take a Democrat if it was JFK, right now, parties shouldn’t be the issue, we need someone who is at the very least a centrist. I do not see that in either party. I hope this will change. My roots are Republican, but I do not see Palin as an answer. Still, leftist politics are tearing this country apart.
If the repubs don't gain enough seats in the House next November to stop the Obamanista coup in it's tracks, there won't be enough of the currently shrinking private sector left by 2012 to save.
Without a growing private sector, there will be no economic recovery.
We are years away from realizing that.
-Dave
On O'Reilly the other night, Monica Crowley said it best when she said that Sarah Palin is an existential threat to the Left ... but I think it goes deeper than the policy positions Monica cited as her basis for that conclusion.
Over the years, the intellectual elites have capitalized upon our respect for education and expertise, morphing it into something that more resembles worship than respect ... in the process, inflating their own perceived value in the eyes of both themselves and the public ... to the point that respect and deference from the public for them as "betters" is now EXPECTED as the status quo -- along consistent disdain for those who oppose their ideas, simply because this opposition does not belong to the elite class.
Their actual value, OTOH, has come far short of "better" when their ideas have been applied ... but the public has been discouraged from challenging them, because of that status quo.
As for the elites, this environment has encouraged them to find ways to illustrate their "superior" intellect on a continual basis, to the point that they have gone beyond reason and common sense into the La-La Lands of angels-on-pinhead navel-gazing and over-thinking that lead to paralysis-by-analysis and skepticism of simple truth.
Sarah Palin comes along, and (like Rush Limbaugh did), reinforces what millions already know is true by giving a public voice to it. That is her credibility ... not merely from her intellect, but from the truth she expresses.
What some deride as a lack of intellect, is instead a simple wisdom that does not stoop to lying to oneself in attempts to prove one's intellectual superiority. She does not over-think and create the alternate realities of her critics, but instead settles for mere reality.
Rusty, we don't need gravitas as much as we need authenticity from our leaders ... especially an authentic realization that they are not demi-gods who deserve our worship and are immune to serious challenge.
The more of that authenticity that we see from Sarah Palin and others like her in the public eye ... the more the perceive value of intellectual elitism drops in the eyes of the public.
And that is what scares the willies out of the Left ... for their self-worth is tied up in the worship of their own intellect. To see that all the causes and ideas they have worked so hard to promote are actually folly, is quite unsettling to them.
That is why Sarah and those like her must be destroyed BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, fact and reason be damned ... which is an easy road to take when one embraces, as so many of our elites have, a relativist worldview ... even if it is a highway to their own, and their neighbors' destruction.
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