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Count Sarah Palin 'in' not 'out'

Faster horses

Well-known member
Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Sarah Palin said she “won’t close the door” on a potential presidential bid during an interview on the “Fox News Sunday” program.

“It would be absurd to not consider what it is that I can potentially do to help our country,” she said.

Asked why she wouldn’t run for president, the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee responded that she has not ruled it out.

"I would if I believe that that is the right thing to do for our country and for the Palin family."

Palin, 45, said she is receiving daily e-mail briefings on domestic and foreign policy from Washington advisers and that she is more knowledgeable on those topics than in 2008.

“My focus has been enlarged,” she said. “So, I sure as heck better be more astute on these current events, national issues.”

Palin said some of President Barack Obama’s decisions have been “misguided” and that he expects Americans to “sit down and shut up and accept” his policies.

“Instead of lecturing, he needs to stop and he needs to listen on health care issues,” she said.

War Card

Palin predicted that Obama could win a second term, if he “played the war card” and declared war on Iran or took other more aggressive military action.

“People would perhaps shift their thinking a little bit and decide, well, maybe he’s tougher than we think he is,” she said.

Palin is scheduled to campaign today for Texas Governor Rick Perry, a Republican facing a primary challenge from Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison.

She has been employed as a contributor at Fox News, owned by New York-based News Corp., since January.

The interview’s broadcast came the morning after she criticized Obama’s first year in office by saying “the list of broken promises is long” during a speech to the Tea Party movement’s inaugural national convention.

The campaign-style speech at a dinner in Nashville, Tennessee, was a frontal assault on the administration’s handling of national security and terrorism, even though she stopped short of declaring ambitions for a 2012 presidential bid as her audience chanted “Run Sarah, Run!”

“America is ready for another revolution,â€

Christmas Bombing Suspect

Palin questioned whether the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit was interrogated aggressively enough.

“Treating this like a mere law-enforcement matter places our country at grave risk because that’s not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this,” she said. “To win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”

The current Democratic administration can no longer blame its Republican predecessor for the nation’s ills, Palin said.

“They own this now, and voters are going to hold them accountable,” she said.

A hero of the leaderless Tea Party movement, Palin told the audience in the U.S. country-music capital that their grassroots efforts will empower voters.

Republican Primaries

Palin said she planned to endorse specific 2010 candidates and that the Republican Party should not be “afraid of contested primaries” within its ranks.

Her appearance -- the first of several Tea Party events Palin plans to attend in the coming months -- marked the end of the three-day National Tea Party Convention.

The convention at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel was the first national meeting of a movement that emerged last year amid protests over the policies of Obama and the Democrats who control Congress.

Palin is planning to speak in March at a Tea Party rally in Searchlight, Nevada, the hometown of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat who is in a tight re-election race. She is also scheduled to appear in Boston in April to mark the movement’s one-year anniversary.

Tea Party activists, drawn to Palin’s anti-Washington rhetoric and working-mother personality, would form a natural base for her, should she decide to make a White House bid.

Washington Outsider

Palin burst onto the national scene 17 months ago when Senator John McCain picked her as a running mate for his Republican presidential campaign. She sold herself as a Washington outsider and “hockey mom,” and after losing the election capitalized on her exposure with a $1.25 million advance to write her memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life.”

“The more she can talk to them and talk to conservative evangelicals, the more she can have a passionate following and appeal to a fairly large swath of GOP voters and independent voters,” said John Feehery, who advised former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

“She has attained rock star status,” he said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean she has a great voice, but she has attained celebrity. For a lot of folks she is off-key. But for her supporters, she’s the best thing since Elvis.”

Feehery said he is skeptical Palin will run for president.

“What she is doing, frankly, I think, is trying to make some money,” he said.

Palin was paid $100,000 for her speech, according to the Associated Press. She told her audience she would give her compensation “to the cause.”
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
Mark Tapscott: Sarah Palin is miles ahead of every other politician in America

By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
February 7, 2010
Sarah Palin greets well-wishers after her address Saturday night before the Tea Party National Convention in Nashville. (Glenn Reynolds/Instapundit.com)

Watching Sarah Palin's speech to the Tea Party National Convention last night in Nashville on PJTV, it was clear that she has a rapport and comfort with the Tea Partiers that is unmatched among politicians at the national level.

While I suspect that mine is a minority view among the leadership of conservative activism and journalism (and I am often reminded in a jocular sort of way that my view of Palin is a minority among my colleagues at The Examiner and The Weekly Standard), I believe Palin is miles ahead of every other national figure in understanding where the country has been in the last year and what the Tea Party movement means about the future course of American politics.

That doesn't mean I think Palin is or even should be a candidate for president or any other elective office in 2012 or any other time. What it does mean is I believe Palin has a unique insight into the state of things and is moving systematically and intelligently in concert with that insight. Where that leads, nobody, including Palin, likely knows at this point.

That I am not alone in seeing Palin in such terms is demonstrated by, of all places, The New York Times where reporter Mark Liebovich wrote:

"Her growing cast of advisers and support system could be working in the service of any number of goals: a presidential run, a de facto role as the leader of the Tea Party movement, a lucrative career as a roving media entity — or all of the above. Ms. Palin represents a new breed of unelected public figures operating in an environment in which politics, news media and celebrity are fused as never before.

"Whether she ever runs for anything else, Ms. Palin has already achieved a status that has become an end in itself: access to an electronic bully pulpit, a staff to guide her, an enormous income and none of the bother or accountability of having to govern or campaign for office.

“'Few public figures not in office have leveraged the nexus between media and political positioning as Sarah Palin has,' said the Washington lawyer Robert Barnett (who negotiated, among other things, Ms. Palin’s lucrative deal with Fox News, an arrangement with the Washington Speaker’s Bureau that pays her a reported $100,000 a pop, and a deal with Harper Collins to write her memoir, 'Going Rogue,' which has already earned her upward of eight figures)."

Liebovich thus demonstrated, as University of Wisconsin law professor and contrarian blogger Ann Althouse mused, how Palin has gone from "blithering idiot" to "devious genius" in barely more than a year:

"What I love about all this is the extreme contrast to the way Palin was mocked when she resigned as Governor of Alaska. I, myself, did not think it was stupid, because I pictured her doing something like what she is actually doing, but I certainly remember the derision. Her political career was over. She was 'toast.'

"A big difference between what I pictured and what she's doing is that she's staying in Alaska. I thought she needed to get out of Alaska (in order to run for President). It's innovative the way she's staying in Alaska. As a blogger, operating from my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, I love that she's working through Facebook and staying rooted in Wasila, Alaska. Fox News is building a TV studio in her house in Wasila. That's so not toast."

During her 40-minute Nashville speech, Palin repeatedly struck rhetorical gold by assailing Washington politicians for talking down to the American people, as when she branded the exploding national debt a form of "generational theft" and proclaimed that "many of us have had enough."

Similarly, she zeroed in on President Obama's policy of treating terrorists like the Christmas Bomber who tried to blow up a Northwest Air plane carrying nearly 300 passengers and crew members with a bomb sewn into his underwear on the same legal basis as an accused liquor store robber, saying "treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at great risk because that's not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this. They know we're at war, and to win that war we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern."

Palin understands the frustration felt by millions of Americans, including legions of independents and moderates, watching as Washington leaders careen down a path of expanding federal power and the skyrocketing spending, taxation, regulation and debt that inevitably accompanies that expansion, even as public opinion surveys document growing oppposition to such a course.

Washington is embarked on a fundamentally anti-democratic course that undermines public confidence and government credibility, the two most essential elements of a regime's legitimacy, and alienates voters across the political spectrum. Most people don't articulate it in such terms but, as political philosopher Willmoore Kendall (himself a product of Oklahoma populism)often said of Middle Americans, they "feel it in their bones," and they are repelled by it.

Palin also demonstrated an understanding that the Tea Party movement must be independent of both major political parties, which share the blame for the country's current morass, in order to be credible.

She encouraged her Nashville audience "against allowing this movement to be defined by any one leader or any one politician. The tea party movement is not a top-down operation. It's a ground-up call to action ... it's bigger than any king or queen of the tea party, and it's a lot bigger than any charismatic guy with a teleprompter."

Thus she encouraged the Tea Partiers to remember that they "have both parties running scared" and that their movement is "fresh, young and agile."

While watching Palin last night, I was reminded of something I wrote in The Examiner the day after the 2008 election: "Palin connects with real people as one of them because she is. She has that rare gift of speaking with candor and grace in the common manner."

Palin is not the first conservative politician to display such a gift. With his eight extraordinary years in the White House behind us, it is sometimes difficult to remember that strident voices from the same quarters who today mock and deride Palin did much the same thing to Ronald Reagan. He was old, he was an actor, he was simple-minded.

And, just as Reagan was consistently under-estimated by his opponents in the years before the White House, Palin appears to be blessed with opponents in both parties who accord her a similar lack of respect.

They say God looks after drunks and the United States of America. Maybe that's why Palin's speech last night opened with this tribute: "I am so proud to be American. Happy birthday Ronald Reagan."
 
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