president this year. What we voted for was a democrat for president and a republican for VP. Think how well we might have done with two republicans on the ticket.

I believe without Sarah, Obama would have won in a landslide. There have been some incouraging stands taken lately, but I fear it may be too little too late.

You can me a Sarah worshipper if you wish, but I’ll say this about her, as I watched her I got the feeling she was being held back. Darn it all we need someone that will say ” bring it on “. McCain didn’t even start to challenge them because he’s really on their side. In the name of unicorns and ponies dancing together McCain and others will support Obama. We’re screwed.

I have no doubts that Palin has engaged in political games along the way. Our form of government is simply controlled revolution.

That said, I also think you have some pretty strong biases that are unrelated to Palin’s actions over the years. Not that that makes you any different than the rest of us.

For me, she’s the best I see out there right now. That could certainly change in the next couple of years.

… I do respect your opinion to not like Sara Palin. However, please try and understand my perspective When I wrote a post critical of Alaska’s corrupt Congressional Representatives before the election, you took offense to that posting.

Does Sara have her issues, yup, but so do I, and I bet you have a few too.

So, as I see it, you are good with corrupt good old boys, but you are not good with the new blood in the party that actually energies people, and may actually change things a bit for us.

However, this is only my opinion. So, please forgive me if I do not hold your dislike of Sara Palin with much regard.

I suspect your male aged ego cannot handle this new spitfire female coming out of your AK and making a huge impact on American politics……it must be painful for you and all those other old men you dallied with in politics up there in AK …..but know this Palin has excited the base in a way NONE of those old white male CROOKS you have had up there in AK ever could and you all better just get over it!

Sarah Palin really doesn’t like Southeast Alaska generally and Juneau specifically. She’s hardly been here except when the Legislature was in session and the Governor’s House, it’s not a mansion here, has stood empty. It was easy for her to say she fired the chef, nobody ever eats there. It was easy for her to say she cut the budget, almost all the cuts were in Southeast where nobody much likes her anyway.

So it’s a regional thing.Fair enough, I seem to remember Tusconians hating Phoenix when I grew up in Arizona. And I see an fair amount of LA hatred here in San Diego. Call it the little brother syndrome.

Not being an Alaskan “insider,” I actually like Sarah Palin. However, as most of you here know, I thought she was woefully unqualified and unprepared to be Vice President this year and as a matter of principle could not and did not vote for her. Indeed, if you look at most of my comments regarding Sarah Palin herself, I think everyone here would say that they were mostly “positive” except that, again, I did not think the less than one-term governor of a state with a population smaller than the neighboorhood I grew up in was ready for the second chair.

But as I have probably said and wrote ad naseum, what I could neither fathom nor contenance was the way so many — dare I say, most — people on this board went from agreeing that she was not ready in 2008 to thinking she was “the one”of the Republican Party the day after McCain announced her as the pick. This even aside from the few here who wanted her for blatant “identity politics” reasons. Quite frankly, I think it only showed the hyprocrisy of what conservatism has become.

(As another example of coservative hypocrisy, consider our relative silence and even defense of the Bush Administration’s liberalism. But that is perhaps another thread.)

Indeed, Achance, to a great degree I include you among the hypocrites. To your credit, before Palin was selected, you did “warn” us about her. Yet, after she was selected, until now you were also among her votaries. Why the change now?

But let me also say that, even if I still may have a better opinion of Sarah Palin than you, I respect your diary above. Until we conservatives address the shortccomings of our own, conservatism will fail, no matter who and what party iselected. Again, see George W. Bush, for exhibit A.

Q: Who is the last unsuccessful candidate for vice president who went on to win the presidency in the next election?

A: It’s never been done. A cursory Wikipedia check of Republicans (to 1856) and Democrats (to 1828) shows that the closest instance was FDR, who ran & lost as VP in 1920, but ran successfully for president in 1932.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Republican_Party_presidential_tickets
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Democratic_Party_presidential_tickets

Losing a VP bid would seem to be a one-way ticket to palooka-ville, politically speaking.

So why the clamor to anoint Sarah as the future of the party at this time? Why the criticism of McCain for his failure to endorse her for 2012?

But I would be the first to say I know almost nothing about her record and performance history. I like the way she speaks I like her stated positions on issues but as you point out Achance that could be little more than a grifter’s patter.

the jadad who has recommended is nt me got it!

I really liked having Sarah Palin on the ticket. She brought energy to a deadly dull top-of-the-ticket. I mean, could you imagine a McCain/Dole or Dole/McCain ticket? Wow. (Sorry, that thought just occurred to me out of the blue.

Anyway, I’m sure that the one thing we didn’t see during the campaign was Sarah Palin. What we saw was a poorly prepped, thoroughly disdained unknown who was frequently tossed out to the press to be fresh meat with McCain’s positions. I’d be shocked to find out that she actually believed ANYTHING she said from a policy perspective.

I’m somewhat bemused by the Sarah fan clubs here. Let me note that I can find a lot to like in Sarah.

I think she’s shown she can bring real excitement to a campaign and she’s one heck of a stump speaker.
I think she’s a good (or at least good enough) debater to handle about anybody on the other side and, at a minimum, not lose (unlike McCain).
I’m guessing that deep down she’s more conservative than your average Washington DC Republican.
She would appear to be a pretty good political operative. After all, she managed to slice and dice the Republican establishment in her State.
She’s attractive and presents well. She seems to get to the bottom line and seems to have an ability to reduce complex issues to understandable soundbites.

Now then, you’ll notice a bunch of waffling and no specifics on policy up there. That’s because we don’t know much about Sarah Palin. All we know is the buzz and flash that the McCain campaign slapped together and we don’t actually KNOW a damn thing about her policy positions, except for her commitment to life issues. Everything else she said over the last couple of months were John McCain’s positions.

The other thing we don’t know a whole lot about is her executive ability. Yes, she’s got more experience that the other three national candidates combined, but a teeny bit is always more than zip. I’m really interested to see how she manages Alaska over the next few years, and I’m REALLY interested to see what happens when she runs for reelection as Governor.

I must say that I think the Sarah for President folks are buying a pig-in-a-poke at this point in time. She may turn out to be a great candidate with great conservative policy positions and a fantastic record of accomplishment in two terms (or one and a half) as Governor. And then again, she may not. We really don’t know. We also don’t know if she WANTS to run for President, nor do we have a clue about how she’ll stand up against other primary candidates. Or who the other candidates will be.

The one thing I’m really sure of is this. It’s too darn soon to start anointing anybody for 2012. We’ve got a party to rebuild and some demons to kill in the process and that is shaping up to be a war. See today’s WaPo column by John Sidney McCain discussing how he’s going to make sure Obama wins the Iraq War.

Erick/Moe have been outspoken (probably could use some out-speaking on this subject guys) that we’ve got a Congressional campaign in 2010 to deal with that has all the potential to be really ugly for Republicans. There is the outside possibility that Dems could have 65 or so US Senators in 2011. We’ve also got State Parties in a shambles all across the nation and redistricting looms.

We desperately need to define Republicanism, learn how to fight Democrats every minute of every day and find leaders who are committed to winning. The thing we don’t need to be doing is looking around for more Constitutional Amendments to waste our time on and trying to anoint our 2012 candidate.

She’s the only good thing that I got from the last election.

It’s been clear for some time that you are less than thrilled with Sarah Palin. I have been hoping for this diary for some time. I read the article that you linked to. It just sounds like typical governmental actions that some approve of and others don’t.

Your contribution to the diary lacks specifics. Sounds a little like sour grapes.

I don’t know Sarah Palin. I would like to. I am hoping against hope for the next great conservative communicator. The person who can get our message out the way Ronald Reagan did and bring reasonable Americans back to reality.

If she is NOT the real deal, I want to know the facts. But this diary didn’t bring them.

“When, that is when, not if, all the emails related to “Troopergate” that she’s worked so hard to suppress come out, people are going to get a different view of pretty, perky Sarah.”

Why make us wait? If you’ve got the facts, let us know what’s up. This is what infuriates me about politics and this diary, rumor mongering and innuendo.

Many of us have worked with politicians over the years. In doing so, we discovered that they are human and frankly, have a lot of faults.

If any of the ones I’ve had more than five hours of exposure to suddenly became the darling of the Conservative base or the darling of anybody else for that matter, I’d be shaking my head at the fan club.

Politics is not the realm of saints. If it were, a lot more of us would be willing to sacrifice our families to run for office.

So I’m not surprised that Gov. Palin has plenty of warts. I just don’t want to see her singled out because we have a resident expert familiar enough with her to be contemptuous.

She may be the face of the future of the Republican Party, but it’s hard to square a WPT with conservative values.

I read your diary three times and that is pretty much what it boiled down to.

… with all due respect where was this diary in September or October? Why now?

We need to nominate a candidate who can take positions on social and economic issues that are conservative but moderate relative to the policies that Obama will pursue – thereby exposing him for the radical that he is and drawing some moderate voters.

But at the same time the candidate will have to energize the conservative base big time.

Right now I think Palin is the only candidate that has the credibility with the base to do this.

Because so very many people that I despise DON’T like her (present company excluded, achance).

Might I offer another comment about achance’s opinion of Palin, and it goes to my experience with things of this nature. Whether you are on a church committee, Boy Scout Troop or at high levels of government, when you are the position to actually make decisions it is not difficult to hate both the process and your fellow decision makers. As a matter of fact, I believe it is difficult to come out of the process with any good feelings intact.

Sarah Palin has credibility with the base because she seems to live out her beliefs. She can lay out policy position after policy position, but the fact of the matter is most of the base considers her trustworthy – period. She was the only, and I mean the ONLY figure in the Republican party to actually say what everyone was thinking about Barack Obama and the Democrats, and what she got was a bunch of gutless hacks who defamed her and a gutless nominee who refused to defend her. If I have a choice between the two, and it looks like that is the only choice I have right now, I choose Sarah.

I hardly know what to say Achance. That was some entertainment, for sure! I’m not disagreeing with any of it, and I’ve been disposed to think of Palin as a good bit different than the caricatures of either the national Dems/media, and the in-search-of-a-hero Conservatives.

Nobody will ever accuse you of not putting it out there on the line. And in my opinion, it’s better to hear the goods from an Alaskan insider than to *not* hear it at all and fill in the blanks with our own imaginations or media lies. And I reco for that reason.

FWIW, the 45th president, starting 20JAN2013, will be Bobby Jindal, sparing you the whole Palin vs Democrat inner struggle.

Sarah Heath Palin grew up in Wasilla. It is a small enough town that people would know her. If she were of bad moral character people [Wasillans] would know that and wouldn’t keep elecing her as councilwoman and mayor.

When she was nominated as VP candidate the Dems sent an army of lawyers to Alaska to dig up dirt on her and they found ?_____[crickets chirping]_______? Remember how Bush’s 20+ year old drunk driving ticket surfaced just before the 2000 election? If Sarah Palin was dirty we’d know all about it.

Troopergate – Sarah Palin alledgedly used the power of the governor’s office to try to get the man who divorced her sister fired from the state police. Except, this cop really had tasered her nephew and threatened to kill her father – seems like dismissing this cop was certainly a reasonable course of action by any objective standard; he was suspended for 5 days for his behavior.

Sarah Palin is supposedly an uneducated person who doesn’t know anything about foreign affairs. In reality, the Alaska website [http://gov.state.ak.us/bio.html] states that one of Sarah Palin’s interests is Alaska history. Anyone who is knowledgeable about Alaska history knows more about foreign affairs than most Democrats [appeasement is a lousy policy and leads to great suffering]. Sarah Palin also stated that two of the leaders she admires most are Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. She certainly sounds like a person who believes in peace through strength. She has said that when discussing war, “victory” is a word that should be in your vocabulary.

I was extremely captivated by Sarah’s convention speech, her remarkable joy, and her ability to touch people’s hearts as well as engage their minds. And in this campaign, she was the best thing since sliced bread.

But looking forward, conservatives have an extremely challenging political season as the Republican party faces a real prospect of effective political extinction on the national level in the next four years, starting with the prospect of the Democrats approaching or reaching 2/3rds majorities in both houses of Congress by 2010 or 2012, or effectively being buried by a tsunamic of Democratic party money.

It’s far to early to decide who may be the right candidate for the 2012 elections when the future is so cloudy – except that we know that the political dynamics will be totally different than in this strange 2008 campaign. There’s absolutely no way to predict whether Sarah will be the right person for those set of situations.

In other words, Sarah has some real challenges ahead in terms of her ability to effective function as Alaska’s governor, given the economic challenges and that every Democrat in Alaska and nationally is gunning for her. Art has described well that intrastate forces arrayed against her. I’ve also heard some similar demurrals from other Alaska sources.

If Sarah manages to prevail, she will have proven her political abilities and merit serious consideration for national office. If, as Art describes very well, she cannot hold her coalition together and loses control of her state governance (or loses her reelection campaign in 2010) then she won’t be viable for 2012.

In any case, though, Sarah through this campaign has proven herself an excellent stump speaker and one who can communicate to voters. Even if she never gets elected to national office, she will prove a strong asset to the Republican party and to candidates as an effective communicator for conservatism. She very well may have a future as a high appointed official in a future conservative administration.

Thus I see Sarah as having a promising future – but perhaps not as President. Actually, my gut feeling is that President is not her destiny. much as I would like to believe otherwise.

But right now, Sarah is about the only conservative who the country has any interest in learning about or listening to. And that alone makes here an invaluable asset. Plus, the list of enemies she’s attracted nationally is quite impressive. But it is up to Sarah to define herself before the opposition does – and the opposition has a head start. We’ll have to wait and see.

I wish her well – she has been such a breath of fresh air.

Now! more than ever!
America need a pro-life in words and deeds woman politician!
Obama terminate America one baby at a time with FOCA.
God have mercy on us!

I think you have a good governor. I am not an Alaskan so I am not aware of the politics nor the personalities of the state. But from where I sit she has done a good job. As republicans and conservatives we need to want our elected officials to succeed and not fail. If you have ideas for the governor, then present them to her staff if you know them or through your elected officials. This is the problem within the party right now. We need ideas and strategies if we are to bring the party back to majority leadership. Sarah Palin is not perfect anymore than anyone else. But she seems to be genuine and sincere. Your state budget is balanced compared to most of the other states. Your governor is not on tape using profanity and seeking bribes. Nor is the governor involved in sting operations or hidden agendas. If the worst thing you can say about the governor is she may not have the intellectual depth that CNN thinks she ought to have and the pitiful RNC could not have handled the clothes issue better or maybe she should live in Juneau rather than Wasilla, then you have a good governor and a good person. The focus needs to be on Obama not Palin.

This was circulating around the Capitol this week: http://www.adn.com/ear/v-gallery/story/630149.html?/ear/v-enlarge/story/630149-a630148-t3.html

That pretty much covers it, shooting wolves from Santa’s sleigh. We are a bunch of barbarians after all!

Cool it everyone. This needs to stop escalating.

period.

You are starting to sound like Kos Kids.