But is this just a pipe dream? I really felt she was going to run in 2012 but I believe she was given numbers that showed she could not win. I think that tea Partiers and FReepers alone couldn’t do it. She has to win over some of the low info voters.
There would need to be a way to use or bypass the mainstream media. I believe she could win if she could show that the conventional wisdom against her is flat out false, but I am not sure that is even possible. Her negatives are in the Hitler range, lies or not!
I think she should have run, even if Obama defeated her a second time, but she chose not to, and also all but stopped her constant and wonderful public commentary on events. It was as if she had said, “yep, I’m fightin’ for America, but mostly for me, ‘cause if I can’t win, I don’t even want to enter the ring!” And for the second time (first was leaving the governor post, though I understand her reasons, I feel that was wrong), I lost a lot of respect for her.
If she had run, she would have won the primary, and it would have put OUR VALUES into every debate with Obama.
That would have been worth every single bit of pain inflicted on her family. Most of the patriot founders went through a whole lot worse. If she really were devoted to the country, she would have known she was the only candidate to get our values even SPOKEN in the media. So I still feel a little angry at her about that.
Part of her problem back then is that she was quite mad at he GOP and the way she was treated that she got a bit gun shy and resisted taking advise from well seasoned and professionally trained true Tea Party, though strong Conservative GOP members because of how badly she got burned by the underhanded backstabbing dirty tricks by then two slimy self centered RINO anti-Tea Party Principles, McCain and Romney.
Plus there were some pretty vicious threats to her and her family and IMO that had a lot of influence on her decision not to run.
Hopefully she can trust her loyal supporters (millions of them) to have her back and also hire some top notch security people, starting with a small very professional and competent team that did security for her in Searchlight and Reno whom I worked closely with at the Reno event. All of this the first year of the emergence of the modern day Tea Party Movement.
Jim, Yaelle is right, and we need to think this through seriously. For some reason we have never fully understood, Palin considered running and decided against it.
Also, Rockingham raised five very valid concerns at post #192, of which the most important are that her “brand” has been seriously damaged and she doesn't seem to have a solid set of advisers. Those problems can be addressed, but they are real and they have to be addressed if Palin is going to run a credible national campaign now as opposed to, for example, going back to Alaska and using her “ground game” and decades of Alaska political experience to run for the US Senate, and develop a national profile that way.
Do we have any reason to believe the calculus has changed this campaign cycle and she'll run now when she decided against running in the last campaign?
The only things I can see changing are that 1) trying to defeat Mitt Romney and his millions won't be an issue in the 2016 Republican primary campaign, and 2) the Democrats may very well have Hillary Clinton as their nominee or at least as their presumptive front-runner, which means a female Republican could have an advantage in the primary.
On the other hand, one of the biggest things that I like about Sarah Palin is that she appeals to at least two and probably all three legs of the three-legged conservative stool — definitely the social conservatives and the military conservatives, and to some extent also the economic conservative/libertarian wing of the Republican Party.
When she talks Christian conservative language, she's not just saying what social conservatives want to hear — she's walked the walk on the pro-life issues with her child. Likewise, she has legitimate blue-collar credentials and a son in the Army. Her husband runs his own fishing business and that has at least some appeal to the business wing of the Republican Party, and while Palin certainly isn't a classic libertarian, the anti-government atmosphere of Alaska is much more libertarian than what is advocated by many Republicans.
Palin has a lot going for her. But do we have any reason to believe she'll run in 2016 if she didn't run in 2012? I'm guessing that only she and her husband have a good clue on that, and they may not even know what to think.
Bottom line: Let's not put all our eggs in one basket. That's a recipe for disappointment, and maybe for disaster. If Freepers and Tea Partiers put their hopes on a candidate who isn't going to run, and nuke other good candidates, we'll end up with a re-run of 2012 and 2008. None of us want that.