The author, Robert Guttman, gets it - but I suspect that liberals enjoy pretending to be oh-so intellectually superior to Sarah Palin (and the millions of Americans she represents) that they'll willfully ignore Guttman's warning and assume that continually mocking her and non-stop media adulation of Obama will effectively cancel out her appeal. They are mistaken.
This isn't 1970 and liberal mouthpiece Walter Cronkite doesn't decree 'that's the way it is', anymore. The New York Times and the various news magazines no longer decide elections. The dinosaur media is flailing and failing. Granted, they were able to get Obama past the usually apathetic voter in 2008 when things weren't really so bad (although the left pretended they were to give Obama something to run on -'hope and change') but the economic climate has soured and hit many Americans, hard, and they hold Obama responsible, not George W. Bush.
Obama's media hype almost guaranteed his fall when his insane socialist policies were implemented. First, the bailouts and trillion-dollar national debt. Then, the massive health care bill nobody wanted. He's weak on Afghanistan and a disaster on the Mexico-U.S. border chaos. The Gulf oil spill put the spotlight on his incompetence. Meanwhile, independent voters have just about given up on Obama. Even some Democrats are trying to distance themselves from Obama. Never a good sign for a president. His job approval numbers are flirting with the 30's, late-second-term Bush territory.
The media can't save Obama because their audience is shrinking and so, their influence is waning. Meanwhile, the 'alternative media' grows in both audience and influence. Fox News is rapidly replacing once-untouchable CBS as the news source of choice for many Americans - and their ratings prove it. Rush Limbaugh is in his 22nd year of broadcasting his conservative views - and his audience remains in the millions. Meanwhile, the TV broadcast network's news show ratings contract with every passing year. Once influential Newsweek magazine is sold for $1. and it's debts.
I have no idea if Sarah Palin really wants to be president (I suspect that she does) and I don't know if she could win a presidential election. I do know that the woman has a lot going for her and the criticisms are mostly superficial and petty or just Democrat attempts to demean her in the eyes of the public, their standard MO. She seems more solid on her recent Fox TV appearances but still engaging and sometimes, controversial...in a good way (challenging Obama).
When the left never stops bashing Palin and even liberal writers start admitting that she could challenge their messiah, Obama, in 2012, that indicates that Sarah Palin is a political force to be reckoned with. She is the only viable political conservative visible on the national scene and she is, as Robert Guttman's piece stated, gaining ground while other possible 2012 GOP contenders are invisible or near-unelectable (Gingrich).
If Sarah Palin chooses to run for the Republican presidential nomination in two years, she'll have my vote. I see no other viable conservative on the scene. Yes, she's been relentlessly attacked by the left but so was Ronald Reagan. He surmounted the 'dangerous, washed-up, second-rate doofus actor' smears the left tried to pin on him. He did it by simply being himself, and had to get past the then-dominate leftist media. Today, with Sarah Palin getting national attention on Facebook, Twitter, websites and Fox News TV, she can overcome the left's smear attempts. They no longer 'own' the information flow and with the country becoming increasingly turned off to Obama and the Democrats, Palin could be a real contender in 2012. Shhhh. Don't tell the Democrats.
Take a look at the comments, the nutroots aren’t buying it! LOL