Replies

As I wrote after the November 2012 election: “There is one candidate in the GOP who has the resolve and political skill to take similar political and rhetorical hits, because she understands one thing: We have the numbers. The other side knows what she is doing and they know the threat she poses for them. Her strategy is not complicated. Our side has the numbers, but has heretofore lacked the will to mobilize them. The left and its Establishment allies are going to try to destroy her and to demoralize her supporters. This was exactly the strategy employed by Lee in 1864. But Grant was a bulldog who simply would not be deterred. I think Grant and Palin share a characteristic that is sadly absent in politicians today: Sherman referred to it as “four o’clock in the morning courage” meaning that you could wake Grant up at four o’clock in the morning with the news that the enemy had turned his right flank and he would be cool as a cucumber. The fearless Palin too “doesn’t scare worth a damn.”
For the next two years, Sarah Palin is going to relentlessly press Democrats and GOP in the Congress toward Conservative Constitutional governance. They are going to be dropping back, losing ground at every turn. And when they diverge from that path (and they will) they are going to feel the sting of her rhetorical, as well as her political, whip. She will be moving on Washington by the Right Flank. Relentlessly.
Governor Palin realizes that the job cannot be completed without the Presidency in 2012. She realizes as well that this is going to be a hard slog, not a walk in the park. I don’t think she is enamored of fame for its own sake and if there were someone else to do the job, she would be happy to yield the stage. But she knows as well that the current crop of McClellans in the GOP either will not, or cannot, restrain the federal leviathan and unleash the productive capacity of the American people. They are either too invested in the current system or too weakwilled or too politically ungifted to achieve it (and in some cases all three). She is the only politician on the scene with the political capacity, the understanding and the will to complete the reorientation of American political system from its current statist spiral toward proper constitutional interpretation and governance.
The Great Civil War Historian Shelby Foote said, referring to Grant and Lee: “Lee always understood the Union Generals. It is not that he didn’t understand Grant. It was that Grant knew how to whip him. And he did.”

The best concise analysis of Sarah's strategy that I've read; incisive, persuasive, and correct.