I, for one, am sadly disappointed in Sarah Palin. Her decision to leave office was, in a word, dumb. It’s almost as if she’s in a competition to out-stupid herself.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a Republican. I was as hopeful and pleased as any of us that McCain chose her. I was thrilled to have her on the ticket.But she was a one-trick pony and that speech at the RNC was all she had in her. From then to now, she has been on a long, steady slide into buffoonery. And Friday she hit the grand slam of stupidity. At a quickly and poorly arranged press conference, where state troopers oddly kept half the press away, she resigned her governorship in a rambling, disjointed and indecipherable speech.
Halfway through her first term as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin is quitting, which makes me wonder who she’s spent time with on the Appalachian Trail. Or who’s blackmailing her. Or who’s offered her a million-dollar job. Or something... because there is no way on God’s green earth that what she did Friday makes any sort of sense at all. She gave no reason, she made no sense, it does nothing but make her look like a bigger fool than even Tina Fey thought she was. Part of me wondered if she was having a breakdown.Let me repeat, I’m not a Sarah Palin basher. I was as enthused as anyone when John McCain picked her. The notion of someone who seemed to be a true conservative being on the Republican ticket was both surprising and exciting. I loved the fact that she was a hunter and an angler and a businesswoman, that she owned trucks and guns, that her husband was a real man and a normal guy. I was glad to see one of us getting ahead.
But she turned out not to be ready for prime time. She also took quite a beating. Seeing that she was the only excitement on the Republican ticket, the Democrat news media attacked her viciously. Following the It-Worked-With-Cheney plan, the Democrats made her personal destruction their strategy. They don’t refute ideas, they destroy and marginalize the people who communicate ideas. She was mocked, ridiculed and dismissed. At every turn, she was made to look like a joke. Unfortunately, she lived up to it.And though the same Democrat news media had taken to calling her a leading prospect for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, she was never a contender, which was assured Friday. Who is going to vote for a candidate who barely filled half of a gubernatorial term? When a candidate runs for office, there is an implied pledge that if you vote for them they are actually going to serve. Anyone who walks away from office for no good reason, with almost half of the job left to do, is not a free spirit, that person is a quitter. And when that decision and that announcement are made rashly and without explanation, your temperament certainly doesn’t look presidential. To run down to the lower 48 now and begin campaigning for 2012 would show Sarah Palin to be someone who puts her own ambitions ahead of her duty, it would show her commitment to actual service to be pretty low.
There was a negative magazine article about her last week, and then a series of rehashed newspaper articles that talked about Republican sniping, but if that heat chased her out of the kitchen, she had no business being there in the first place. Granted, she made the announcement in the middle of non-stop Michael Jackson “news,” and on the legal-holiday Friday before Independence Day – things which reduced the amount of coverage she would likely receive – but being the second Republican governor to do something really goofy in two weeks is not a smart move.And inexplicably resigning your office in the wake of the scandal involving the South Carolina governor is going to make some people wonder if something sleazy has been afoot. It was just insane. It mystifies the country, it cheats Alaska, it embarrasses her family.
I just don’t get it.After two years of running a state that has fewer people than 87 American counties, she is packing up her hair spray and going home. I wish her luck, but I don’t want anybody to be confused about the future of the Republican Party. As much as the Democrat news media wants to appoint Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin as the Republican Party’s leaders, the people are its leaders. It’s not one of the preening many who will determine the direction of the Republican Party, it is the people – the plain old salt-of-the-earth people who belong to the Republican Party or vote for its candidates.
The Democrat news media wants to define the Republican Party as a series of politicians or pundits who can be ridiculed and demonized. But that’s not what the Republican Party is. The Republican Party is a collection of values living in the hearts of the types of people who made this country strong and free. The Republican Party is the living commitment in the American people to the values of the Founders of our nation and the Framers of our Constitution. It doesn’t really matter who represents or advances those values, just that they get represented and advanced.Sarah Palin made a great speech at the RNC. If the months since have taught us that we don’t want a speech giver, they haven’t done a thing to change the fact that we liked what the speech contained. The Republican Party is about principles, not personalities. And though the personalities will change, the principles will not. At least not if the Republican Party wants ever again to be successful or useful to the cause of American liberty.
So let Sarah Palin be dumb. In a free country, you can do that. What we need to be focused on is trying to keep this a free country.
