“Stone likens Palin’s decision to step down from the Alaska governorship to that of Richard Nixon, who in 1962 “got fed up with being called Tricky Dick, got fed up with being the man that nobody would buy a used car from, and fed up by the constant assault on his values and his middle-class background by the liberal media,” he says.
“So, in 1962 he did what Sarah Palin just did –– he quit politics. Six years later he was inaugurated as President of the United States.”
This was my first reaction when I heard she resigned. Nixon spent the next four years raising money for R’s all over the country. By the time 1968 rolled around, everyone in the party owed him big time. Palin can do the same thing with her drawing power.
There’s a parallel to Reagan also. Reagan spent his years out of office establishing who he was to the public. It takes a long time for a charismatic conservative to establish a public identity (other than Satan incarnate) over the screaming of the old media.
I remember listening to Reagan’s radio commentaries during the Carter adminstration, before syndicated political talk radio. They helped turn me from a young, naive lefty to a nationalist/libertarian Reagan voter in 1980.