First, she’s not on the cover of People every week. I think she’s only been the cover once actually, when she was named to the ticket.
2nd, I highly doubt any Republican who needs to has trouble getting in contact with her or someone in her orbit. Just ask Greta Van Susteren, she probably has a GPS tracking device secretly planted somewhere in those Kawasaki frames.
I do think if she decides to run for President she’ll have to step outside of the FOX cocoon. It’s true that everyone in the MSM media has it in for her, but every conservative has to deal with that and if she wants to be Preisdent she will as well.
Also, she will definitely need a political operation/campaign manager. Everyone already has one. Romney and Huckabee from their 2008 bids. Pawlenty, Daniels, Barbour from their Governorships. She doesn’t. As far as I know her campaign manager when she ran for Governor was just a good friend she knew from the Gym pr something like that. Not an experienced pol like a Rove(wuth W from his TX days) or an Axelrod(with Obama from his Senate days). Usually someone has a team that’s been with them for a while.
I’m guessing she’s watching some of the women candidates running and paying attention to their staffs and potentially vice versa in terms of some them “auditioning”. If Fiorina takes out Boxer for example I’d think the people behind that campaign would start to look very attractive. If Angle takes out Reid same for her staff. Ditto for Haley, Ayotte, etc...
A nice article, though.
Campaigns tend to use practice runs. For Obama, his own campaign in 2004 and more to the point Patrick in MA, were the practice runs. Patrick in MA was all about how to run an intelletcual black guy and have him appeal to white folks, the test drive of the Obama campaign in 2008. Brown in MA and moreso Whitman in CA are clearly practice runs for Romney, they’re run by the same people. Whitman is all about how to run a non-ideological technocrat with loads of cash and a background in Wall St and coporate America. If she wins her campaign will be the model for Romney the next year.
If anything, the various primary and general campaigns by pro-life women like Fiorina, Haley, Angle, Martinez, Fallin, Handel, Ayotte, and Norton will provide lots of lessons. They’re in key states, different areas of the country. They’ll show what strategies work, what don’t. What issues play. How to discuss the economy, what policies work against the dems, appeal to independents, etc... They’ll be useful laboratories. I recall reading that a problem with the McCain staff was that no one on his staff had any experience with a woman candidate and how to run them. After this year, there will be plenty of people with experience of running conservative women.