That’s because there’s a LOT, an iceberg-sized lot, of inside baseball that happens politically that neither you nor most of us here see.
And it’s corrupt and dirty to the core.
I’ve begun to see just what good ol’ boy crap happens at the local and state levels.
Magnify that to the national level.
It ain’t pretty.
And one of the reasons you don’t see it is so that gullible folks like you can make statements like that.
Look back at the interview Palin gave to Greta Van Susteren about a week before her announcement: It was full of protestations of I won’t be handled, shackled, and I’m not for sale.
As in her speech in Iowa a few weeks back right after her public contretemps with Karl The Demolition Man Rove: I am not for sale.
So sure, she could have run. And been Goldwatered by the Romney GOP.
Just as Goldwater was Goldwatered by the Rockefeller GOP.
She’s smarter than that.
I believe “alley cat smart” was the term that former 2-term Alaska governor, Tony Knowles, said of her after she beat him out in the 2006 gubernatorial election.
So yes, you have plausible deniability to state that the GOP did not physically or legally prevent her from running.
But they very much made it apparent that if she were to run, she’d have to do so their way. Or else.
She declined those conditions.
As she may also decline whatever assinine conditions Romney’s GOP puts on her in order to speak at the Romney Lovefest convention.
I’d see that as a pretty low opinion of Palin, the victim.
The party kept her from running in the primary, caused her to dance and tease about running, kept her from endorsing someone and attempting to unite behind one notRomney candidate...
She couldn’t run with the big dogs, they were just too powerful for little Sarah.
Sorry, I don’t buy it.
I think that you're 100% correct about what was going on behind the scenes with the GOP-E and Palin. In this context, her comments about not being for sale or handled make perfect sense.