As to Sarah Palin's virtues, they are legion and the attacks against her are worse than unscrupulous, they are repugnant to any sense of virtue. But to quote the enemy, Jack Kennedy-who today might well be an ally-"first you got to get elected."
All of Sarah Palin's virtues are of no use whatsoever if she loses the election.
You have this ‘submit’ to the air of inevitability about you.
“All of Sarah Palin’s virtues are of no use whatsoever if she loses the election.”
That is actually not true. She would still clearly articulate what needs to happen to fix the country, and people can reflect on that for four more long, dark years of 0 “leadership” in the unlikely event she did lose. (I hope a clear majority of Americans vote against 0 having more Supreme Court picks regardless of who the R nominee is, though.)
My belief is, though, that regardless of Sarah’s public image come November 6, 2012, most people will vote for her because they want “anyone but 0bama”. In fact, by then the complete contrast of her style, beliefs and integrity with 0 will make her a very attractive option.
Not true, and Sarah has explicitly made the point herself. No regime can succeed without virtuous citizens, and no evil regime can long remain evil if it is peopled by virtuous citizens. We can and do all make a difference, regardless of vocation.
she was either incapable or unwilling to win in Alaska
This refers to the general allegation that she quit. I call it “allegation” because “quit” is a charged word and in the sense it which it is typically applied to her is demonstrably not true. To expose this consider the following groups of questions:
1) Why is quitting bad? If someone quits smoking, isn’t that good?
2) Do you still have your first job? If not, doesn’t that mean you too are a quitter? If you did quit, did you have a good reason for quitting? Doesn’t that mean there can be good reasons for quitting?
3) Is quitting due to a lack of will to do the right thing what really bothers you? If so, wouldn’t you have to first know what is the right thing to do? Does it matter if a person’s history shows that in the past, they never quit out of a lack of determination, but out of a need to position themselves to do the right thing?
4) Is a lack of ability to solve a particular problem always bad? What about the field commander who won’t “quit” a futile engagement, even if faced with overwhelmingly superior firepower? Isn’t it better, if possible, to surprise the enemy by changing the equation into one you have a chance of winning?
I liken this whole “quitter” meme to the Kobayashi Maru scenario in Star Trek. Palin was faced with what appeared to be a fatal dilemma, in 2D chess, an inescapable checkmate. But, like Kirk, she reprogrammed the game to one she could win. I am an attorney, and I can tell you there were limits on how she could solve the problem. Obama’s DNC was supporting the operation to hit her with a new ethics charge an average of once every three weeks. The people doing the attacking apparently stated openly that they intended to immobilize her governorship and break her financially. Under the rules of the game, as long as she honored the rule of law, she was tied to a scenario where she could not defend herself in the press and could not ethically prevent, by any legal or political mechanism, the attacks from occurring. Whereas her opponents, being liberals, found obeying the law inconvenient to their purpose, and repeatedly violated the law by leaking one negative headline after another, with no adverse repercussions. If she had stayed in that situation, the only possible outcome was complete destruction of her ability to govern, complete destruction of her political reputation, and ruinous, insurmountable personal debt.
I have challenged others and I challenge you. You claim her strategic retreat reflects either an inability or an unwillingness to beat back the assault while retaining an effective governorship. I put it to you directly: By what as yet undiscovered mechanism, within Alaskan legal and political parameters, should she have solved the problem? I am still waiting a response from the others. Perhaps you will be the first. And after you have solved that, please also suggest alternatives that George Washington could have used, as he too was an avid user of strategic retreat in the face of overwhelming firepower. I look forward to your response.
Of course, despite all the foregoing analysis, it will not be possible to have such illuminating conversations with every possible voter, and some percentage will remain, to the end, unreached. The question is not whether some will be affected by lies and misrepresentations. The misinformed you have with you always (even with respect to your own candidate). The question is whether, in the context of a strong and broad support apparatus, which you admit Palin has, you can move enough people into the “informed” column to make a difference.
You offer a glancing blow at answering that question, but your piece errantly assumes static conditions, that people will all remain frozen exactly where they are today, and that we have via polling an accurate representation of where they are frozen today. But a static analysis inherently lacks the modeling power to yield an accurate electoral prognosis. For that you need dynamic analysis, which entails looking at multiple simultaneous possibility sequences and in dynamic interaction with each other over time.
For just a small example, with respect to the “quitter” meme, many core Palin supporters are finding that A) it is relatively easy to overcome among family and friends who are not hardcore leftists, using an approach similar to the questions above, or B) it just doesn’t matter to these people as much as some political types think it should. This means that even if the polling data were an accurate snapshot of current conditions, and that the “quitter” meme had a quantifiable relationship with the purported negatives (and I am not aware of any such documented correlation), that there is significant activity in play, right now, that is diluting those negatives with truth. “Palin evangelism,” if you will.
In my own experience, I have repeatedly been able to push people who were fixated on “the big quit” to a place of “wow, I never knew that, I’ll give her a second look.” That’s all we may need for now. Like a friend of mine in sales told me (we were talking about Sarah), you don’t always have an option of getting to “total victory” in the first encounter. Sometimes it is enough to plant the seed of understanding. Then later, when, as Peter Singleton puts it, we start getting help from heavy artillery and air cover, we will start advancing in big steps into enemy territory and the push for total victory moves from mere possibility to likely reality.
The other big variable in this situation that makes it quite unlike either the Goldwater or the Reagan era is the dynamic of modern communication and information technology. I’m going out on a limb here and postulate that whereas in the bad old days of Walter Cronkite & Company, the left could wag the dog according to a prefabricated narrative, we now have the talking right, social media, internet news, all diminishing greatly the ability of establishment media to wag the dog, thereby increasing the power of unvarnished truth to do a little dog-wagging of its own.
Put another way, if a lie can get around the world before the truth can get out the front door, modern technology has made possible for the truth to catch up to the lie in less than one news cycle. That makes it much more difficult for the enemies of freedom to succeed with manufactured lies. That’s why Iran, Egypt, China, and other totalitarian countries have resorted to shutting down or severely controlling the internet media, and why our own beloved regime is toying with similar concepts. Freedom of speech plus the internet makes lying much harder. That hurts Obama, but it helps Sarah.
So, while I think it is right to respect the challenge of the task, it is also important to assess the task correctly, and to keep perspective on what it could mean to fail, because retaining who we are as a people is far more important than winning any given political contest. As has been pointed out elsewhere, if you surrender a good, conservative candidate to the volcano god of the MSM, in the hopes they will leave your personal favorite alone, you are sadly mistaken.
So you see, there is a sense in which we are all in this together. Yes, we need to vet candidates. But no, we should never sit back and accept the destruction of one of our own by the left as if it were the inevitable consequence of ruthless nature. Such thinking is surrendering to the enemy, surrendering to the Nietzschean norm of brute animal force over truth and reason, and it is inherently self-destructive of us to do so, because if we let the left get away with robbing us of Palin, just because they say so, we show them we are too weak to ever be taken seriously. If in all this there is a hill worth dying on, undoing the Palinization of Sarah Palin in time for this race is it.
I read all of your posts on this thread and respect your opinion always. But this time I must disagree with you. IMO the difference is the times in which the election takes place.
RWR had many of the same problems that Sarah has without benefit of the internet or alternate media sources. 1980 was the first election in which I was eligible to vote and thanks to my Dad, I voted for Reagan. It was so exciting leaving my evening class and anticipating a long night of nail biting election returns. After all NBC,CBS, and ABC told me that was how it would happen. So imagine my shock to turn on the car radio and hear Carter’s concession speech and to tell you the truth he sounded even more shocked than I was.
I don’t need to tell you how grim those days of 1978-80 seemed. Even youth could not shield me from the idiocy of Carter and the results of his poor decisions that the nation had to shoulder. IMO people were not so willing to give their vote away to empty headed do gooder type campaigning.
1992,1996 and to some degree 2008 were years when things were at least ok and in the case of 1992 and 2008 Republicans were punished (”no new taxes” and well “W” who as you pointed out refused to defend himself). Today things are not OK in way shape or form and despite MSM best efforts, it cannot be pinned on any Republican living or dead.
I honestly believe that Sarah can win over VA, FL, PA and either OH or NC (maybe both). Remember there are a lot of people like you (and my dad) who worry about how electable she is .... the other side of the coin is how detestable obama is.
Barack Abyss Obaama is the WEAKEST Dem contender since Jimmuh Dhimmi Carter: and if things continue on the present path, maybe since LBJ who declined even to run for re-election.
What better time to advance a true conservative?
If not Palin, who?
If not now, when?
I am surprised at this attitude of yours given your tagline: Palin is the living embodiment of it.
Cheers!