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for your informative reply here, and also below. As I’ve said, I respect your experience and knowledge, and enjoy when you are writting about anything other than Palin. I loved reading your history of the Wassilla area, it sounds frightful to one more accustomed to modern things like electricity, indoor plumbing and all those things we couldn’t live without, or think we can’t because most haven’t gone through survival training. Still though, I think to generalize every resident of any area as not having more than 2 functioning brain cells is unfair, and inaccurate. I’d like to think that every resident living in Newark NJ couldn’t strike a match and start a fire, but, that would be equally unfair, and not accurate. That was my point about disqualifying anyone from Wassilla as having not gotten out of the cave man era.

Please do not think I am saying that you are wrong on anything you have posted as to Alaskan politics/government. What I have said is that that is how you perceive things, based on your own personal experiences. Until they start cloning people, God forbid, everyone comes to the table with their own tastes, temprements, traditions, upbringing, education and etc. You have formed your opinions, and have expressed them here as only Achance could. All those Chicagoans, now in the Obama administration, have come from a lifetime in Chicago politics, and there is no doubt many believe that they are right and righeous. Don’t you think that Van Jones thinks he is brilliant, or Anita Dunn, or to a lesser extreme Sebelius? I am not comparing you to the marxists, but just making a point of differences. That is why I said, if Palin came here, and got into a debate with you, and you both through your minds eye out there, one could read, and then come to their own conclusions. I am not taking anything away from you Achance, I am simply saying that we have your take on things, the opinion parts, but, no words from the one on the other side of the debate. The ones I do have a problem with are the ones that have just choosen to parrot your thoughts and comments about Palin, those I now think of as Achanceistas.

That’s not the problem. The problem is that when the stuff hit the fan she chose to run off and hide on a national book tour instead of dealing the issues she was elected at the state level to deal with. It’s pretty much the same complaint I have with Romney, although he did have the good graces to complete his only term in office.

not telling the truth and it has been her trademark in politics. That doesn’t make her just another politician. I won’t go so far as to call her a liar. A liar to me is someone who knows the truth and chooses to say something else. I really believe that she believes her fairy tales. I’ve known a lot of politicians and the ONLY one I’ve ever known that was more self-involved and narcisistic than Palin was former US Senator Mike Gravel.

I’ve always been a firm believer in dancin’ with who brung me; your word and trustworthyness are the only things of lasting value in politics. Sarah has been taken to the dance by a lot of political figures in Alaska and she has never left with who brung her; she even left the dance with the whole voting public of the State for the next glittering thing. She has turned on everyone who has ever supported her and has vilified most of them. If John McCain had won, it would have been the most miserable four years of his life as he spent every waking moment fearing and waiting for the knife in his ribs. He seems to have figured out what we who knew her here knew; Sarah is a real nice woman – till you get to know her!

…that if I really wanted to be a sycophant I could have clambered back aboard the Palin Train after her resignation and continued to parrot the prevailing view that she’s Jesus Christ with a sex change. It’s easy to do that; not so easy, in a climate in which her book has just come out and Palinmania is at a fever pitch, to come out and tell fellow conservatives that you simply do not believe or trust her. Few conservatives are willing to do so publicly, because who wants to get piled onto by the conventional wisdom? But people should say something before the Republican Party locks itself, over two years before the primaries, into support of a potential candidate who is a divisive, self-serving empty skirt.

The perspective of somebody who has seen and experienced Sarah Palin’s style and method of campaigning and governing first-hand, from the ground in Alaska, is indeed invaluable and that is why Art’s exposes are so vital. Because I’ve never been to Alaska. I don’t know anything about Alaskan politics. And it’s been telling that the people on RedState (not just Art) who have lived there and know what’s going on there have a very different story from the one that’s been sold to us over the last year and a half. Over a year ago, about a month before the election, I had been researching state legislatures and was trying to figure out the bizarre split among the Republican majority in the Alaska State Senate, with about three quarters of them forming a coalition with the Democrats and effectively handing Democrat Johnny Ellis control of the chamber. It was only recently, revisiting that research, that I realized that the forming of this coalition, which continued on after the ’08 elections, had coincided with the beginning of Palin’s term as governor, so I’ve not been surprised to hear from Art that Palin did indeed have something to do with the split. But then, Palin ran around in 2008 telling America she was a party-bucking “maverick” in the mold of John McCain, so what did I expect?

You are correct: Sarah Palin is indeed a politician, in that her actions appear to be opportunistic and self-serving, and that she will stab her benefactors in the back if it suits her. But we have many, many, many politicians devouring this country; it doesn’t mean that we should take the ones that look cute and sound good and make them automatic candidates for President. If my governor, Bobby Jindal, were to run for president in ’12, I’d have a number of things to say about him that would belie the portrait that has been painted of him over the last couple of years as another magnificent reform governor and Great White Conservative Hope who is the future leader of the party — like how he vacillated about, and nearly allowed to pass, the obscene legislative pay raise that scandalized the entire state and then tried to wash his hands of all responsibility for it; how he’s used taxpayer dollars for campaign junkets up to north Louisiana to shore up his support there in advance of the 2011 election; how his idea of “economic development” in this perpetually impoverished state is to bribe businesses into relocating here on the backs of even more taxpayer dollars; and his general disinterest in actually governing despite holding one of the most powerful governorships in America, and facing a looming budget shortfall that is the highest of any “red” state. (If it came down to a choice between the two I would still take Jindal over Palin, though, because he’s done more at a younger age and so far hasn’t abruptly quit his job.)

Yes, Sarah Palin is a politician, and it is always dangerous to put your full faith and trust in a politician — particularly one whose career began last weekend and whose star has been pushed into orbit on the basis of platitudes, personality, and sound bites. The Democrats have already done that. We can do better.

And I fully understand and agree that NY-23 was a hill to die on.

But that has nothing to do with Sarah Palin. The bottom line for her is that in the first major test of her electoral influence, the candidate she endorsed lost. If anything, she probably energized Democrats to support Owens, meaning her endorsement was a wash, at best.

A defeated VP candidate, a cut-and-run ex-governor, and now a failed kingmaker. Tell me again why we’re making her the front-runner for President?