Sarah Palin isn't looking too good
 

I just got done watching a Fox news report about the supposed rift between Sarah Palin and the McCain insiders and it wasn't pretty.

According the report the people in charge of getting her up to speed with the campaign were stunned about her lack of basic knowledge. It was reported that she couldn't name the countries involved in NAFTA, she misidentified Africa as a country and didn't understand the concept of American Exceptionalism. In short she was described as a very shallow woman, in way over her head and totally incapable of dealing with the stresses of a Presidential Campaign.

With that sort of rep leaking out of the McCain camp I wonder if she has any future in the Republican party at the national level.

The video isn't on the Fox website but it should be tomorrow.

I saw that report. Have to wonder...is it true, and is she the scapegoat?

It's just staff CYA.

Pat

So why did they pick her? Staff is responsible for due diligence, and they screwed it up. This makes them look bad, not her.

I wouldn't expect anything less from the folks that ran a completly inept campaign. Had they let Sarah be Sarah and McCain be McCain instead of trying to mold them into what they thought everyone wanted them to be things might have been different. From what I understand, the reason she did so poorly in the initial interviews was because they tried to change her. When they finally let her be herself in the debate with Biden is when she truly shined.

Wouldn't want anyone to man (or woman) up and say it was their fault now would we? It's easier to toss the person who energized the base more than anyone in recent memory under the bus. If they realized she was so dense then maybe they should have allowed McCain to pick Lieberman to be his running mate as I truly believe he wanted to, instead of convincing him she was his savior.

Sarah looks real good...

Film on the news here tonight of her around the pool at the Biltmore Hotel today before returning to Alaska! Looking goooooood!

Especially from my current location....

Stay safe.

I have a hard time believing that Mrs. Palin would be a poor leader. She's not a puppet, nor is she a moron. She strikes me as honest, humble, and wise, which are very important aspects of a leader.

She is much more ready to lead than Barack Obama, if that is any sort of standard.

Sir, I agree. The GOP convention wasn't going well. McCain was my first choice but it was clear that many other Republicans still had many reservations. Gov. Palin burst upon the scene like a cascade of sunlight. Her speech was the best I heard from a convention floor since 1984.

It was clear that she didn't have the educational pedigree of a typical Beltway politician, that she was more concerned with serving her constituents than what people half way around the world thought of her, and that, what ever her own preference, she had the wisdom to check with her advisers first before making a decision.

To me, Gov. Palin is admirable because she is comfortable in her own skin and doesn't feel the need to convince her supporters or her critics that she's something she's not. I'd feel much better if the president-elect were to take a lesson from her.

"insiders"
 

"insiders" with no names.

CYA time and the established "insiders" are trying to trash the only bright spot in the whole campaign.

Concur...the bodies stacked under buses in D.C. will make navigation difficult at best.
The suck-up-and-maneuver season is getting wound up.

Political appointee pet projects have just gone from being High Priority to the trash heap. Career Civil Servants will drag their heels and delay knowing the end is near.

The photo in the picture frames by the front door will be changed out and the bureaucracy will continue to grind along.

It is in real terms a peaceful exchange of power. In many places there would be machete-wielding loons in the street....

I believe this is just scapegoating on the part of a failed campaign by inept campaign staff. I think I can confidently state that Juan McCain got as many votes as he did because of Sarah Palin. I had no intention of voting for him until he put her on the ticket, and I dare say I'm not in the minority.

I think there is a wing of the Republican party that is distinctly liberal. Therefore, they wish to discredit a promising conservative candidate before she has a chance to build a strong following. They may be too late.

There is also the issue of shallowness. Most people are shallow in some areas. I have not known many people I can regard as leaders - but the few who meet that standard share some attributes. They are smart, of course; in addition, they have solid knowledge in a number of areas. However, the important aspect of character is their ability to work through others, and to bring out the best elements of subordinates. Thus, it is less important that a leader know the details of NAFTA than that she find and use good people who do. It seems to me that Sarah Palin could be a good and effective leader.

Fox video

http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video0...w.foxnews.com/

Same old story
 

These are the same folks that didn't want to push the issue about Rev Wright? Mr. Ayers? Past relationships with other shady individuals? Breaking the word about campaign finance? Etc etc etc......

This is typical daily nonsense. Instead of owning it and saying "we got beat". Everyone starts looking for excuses and/or scapegoats to toss under the bus.

What BS. BHO and JB were elected in large part because they managed, in the face of all evidence, to run to the right of JMcC-SP. Go figure.

BHO-JB pretended they weren’t much different from social conservatives. In fact, they didn’t look much different from fiscal conservatives, either, and played the bogus “tax cut” card better than JMcC. They got away with it for two reasons:

1) The JMcC-SP campaign was so busy being Democrat Lite “mavericks” that they refused--unlike the participants on this forum--to raise issues that would have given voters a stark moral choice.

2) The media were happy to ignore the disconnect between the BHO rhetoric and his radical policies and associates. They had the perfect excuse: If the JMcC campaign doesn’t make an issue of these things, why should we?

Exit polls showed that voters overwhelming thought the economy was the most important issue. The MSM blames the government-driven mortgage collapse on either the GOP or “the free market”...and JMcC-SP respond by talking about Wall Street “greed” and those “greedy” old BIG OIL companies. This is the insidious language of envy politics, and the GOP is certainly not in the same league with Dems when it comes to playing that card.

Given the MSMs BHO infatuation and the JMcC campaign’s insistence on sticking to a losing script until the last days, it’s little wonder that many voters decided to “make history” with the first black POTUS. A lot of Americans, regardless of party, are proud of this...although many of us would rather have someone without the resume of BHO.

Absent from the campaign coverage were issues like judicial activism, marriage, abortion, gun control, cultural depravity, and illegal immigration.

The MSM made it all about BHO's historic ascendance and JMcC's-SP’s quirks and fumbles as high-lighted nightly on Dave "The road to the White House goes through me!" Letterman or every weekend on SNL.

When people elect a president, they think about their own economic situation and a potential leader’s character...but whenever BHO’s integrity :rolleyes: came into focus, JMcC was quick to avoid the topic. IMO, it’s one thing to encourage civility, it’s another thing to keep people in the dark out of fear that the media will make you appear “mean” or "vindictive" (Remember Bob Dole?) for stating those oh so inconvenient truths.

Given the thin gruel of dueling tax policies offered by the candidates, many conservatives took the MSM’s cue and yawned. Numbers quickly become a bore (Remember Ross Perot's charts?), especially in an age of text messaging and funny SNL skits.

When the MSM blatantly ignore important issues as it did in this campaign, it is up to the candidate to raise them. But JMcC was so busy distancing himself from GWB that his own “change-maverick” theme was barely distinguishable from BHO’s.

IMO, the MSM shamelessly shilled for BHO...but they had a lot of help from the invertebrate wing of the GOP and JMcC's campaign staff.

An interesting post-script to all this may yet be forthcoming from Alaska, of all places. AK Senator Ted Stevens has won re-election--and has been convicted on 7 felony charges. Governor SP will have the authority to replace Stevens and, if she chooses to fill that seat herself, may create (1) an interesting dilemma for President BHO when seeking to woo Congress in support of his foreseeable socialist policy agenda and (2) set the stage for an interesting 2012 Presidential race. ;)

Richard's $.02 :munchin

Sir, if I may say so, that is a superb analysis. Thank you.

And thank you also for the cartoons at the end.

Great post Richard, It was right on...............:D

GB TFS

Richard

We should start a Republican Consulting firm so we can get them back on track. The have been sticking their heads in the sand too long. Really good Post.

Oh No retired Generals in our firm.:D

nmap, I am not sure if I would call it a liberal VS conservative thing. There is something else, I just don't understand it. There are people who are or seems to be compulsively anti-Palin or a Palinphobe. For a while in media she was about 90% of the chatter, most negative. None of the rational critique about her seemed to add up for me.

Scapegoating has been a popular hobby since the beginning of time, so that is not new. There are just too many nervous Nellies or nervous Neds who are also very insecure, scapegoating gives them something to hide behind.

Details can be learned, character cannot.

Sarah may be a future threat to others in several ways and she is being "kept in her place".

I'd go hunting with her anytime.

If you believe the contemporaneous news reports the decision to pick Palin came from the big man himself with very little input from anyone outside his campaign manager. If anything it is an indictment on McCain not his staff.

I will be leaving the GOP. If this is what it's denegrated to, then they don't need me and I definitely don't want to be associated with them.

McCain should be ashamed of himself for allowing this to continue without addressing it.

Update: There is hope. Apparently there is a group organizing called "Project Leper" who are out to ostracize those trying to disparage Palin. They are looking to make sure these lepers never work a campaign again. I sincerely hope they succeed.

True. Absolutely true.

And, like you, I'm not at all sure what metric we should use. Liberal versus conservative, or even right versus left seem inadequate.

One thing I do know. Sarah Palin spoke from the heart, or so it seemed to me. She at least seemed to actually believe what she said. And - she had some passion. Her values resonanted with my own in many instances. It was refreshing.

My sense of the schism is that it has to do with perceptions of intellect. David Brooks decried Palin's alleged anti-intellectualism. (Brooks thinks the president elect is brilliant, apparently because the president elect knows who Reinhold Niebuhr is.) He labeled her influence cancerous.

My own two cents. The most difficult thing for many self-described intellectuals to learn and to understand is that an education doesn't trump all. There will always be more that we don't know than what we know. Today's cutting edge knowledge will be tomorrow's trivia.

Well, put. :lifter

Agreed!!

There is no call for this at all! The election was lost. Learn from this. Find the mistakes, and mis-steps, learn from them and move on. My politician father has said for many years now that there is no "P" in the GOP.

It is very clear that the Dems. won with a positive spin in the media, and party support. The GOP could not match that. What we are seeing now from the GOP, reminds me of school-yard bickering that goes nowhere, and solves nothing. Pailn was the GOP pick for VP. They are now trying to blame her for the loss. The loss is a GOP loss. The best way to impower Congress and the rest of the Democratic party, is to keep doing what you are doing, GOP. We'll see Dems in control for the next 20 years!!!:mad:

My $.02.


RF 1

Good point RF1, I believe your right on......:rolleyes:

GB TFS :munchin