Palin continues to confuse her enemies

By James H. Shott

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin continues to confound political observers. The woman whose sudden entrance onto the national political stage so badly confused the liberal machine last fall has just as suddenly announced her departure, unexpectedly announcing her resignation as Governor last Friday, less than three years into her term.

You can evaluate Mrs. Palin’s political effectiveness by looking at how people reacted to her. The barrage of gutter-level personal attacks after Sen. John McCain chose her as his running mate was swift and vicious. So badly flummoxed was the opposition that they stooped to personal attacks that targeted the Palin children, which successfully demonstrated the lack of class and civility of the attackers, and actually helped Gov. Palin.

This strategy found a new low when comic David Letterman suggested that Mrs. Palin’s 14 year-old daughter had had a sexual encounter with a baseball player during a game at Yankee Stadium. He then made disparaging remarks about the Governor’s appearance.

Is this the best the left can do?

This behavior epitomizes the undisciplined mind of fringe liberals, who are so hypnotically linked to their ideology that they cannot accept the idea that everyone doesn’t agree with them, and when people don’t agree with them, they lose control.

Gov. Palin’s enemies in Alaska pursued ethics charges against her that lacked merit, but were expensive to defend, and proved to be a substantial distraction. Politics can often be a dirty game.

The Democratic National Committee committed an unforced error with this reaction: "Either Sarah Palin is leaving the people of Alaska high and dry to pursue her long shot national political ambitions or she simply can't handle the job now that her popularity has dimmed and oil revenues are down. Either way – her decision to abandon her post and the people of Alaska who elected her continues a pattern of bizarre behavior that more than anything else may explain the decision she made today."

Even if every slam against Mrs. Palin in that statement was true, you’d think the DNC would be happy that its enemy is stepping down. Message to the DNC: Sometimes it’s better to just keep quiet.

What millions of Americans like about Mrs. Palin is her basic “normalness”: She is one of us. An attractive wife and mother, college educated, a church-goer, a person with a simple lifestyle, a woman who willingly gave birth to a Down syndrome child instead of aborting it … she could be our next door neighbor. And that is what freaked out the opposition so effectively. Her broad, “normal American” appeal presented an image contrary to everything the radicals believe in, and the only way they could neutralize that appeal was to attack her personally and try to belittle her. But that tactic failed.

Would Sarah Palin have been a good Vice President? Like everyone else, she has weaknesses, and despite her natural appeal didn’t always come across as someone that could run a country. She isn’t a polished and eloquent speaker, but then, consider Joe Biden’s frequent gaffs. She doesn’t have foreign policy experience, but then neither does Barack Obama. However, unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden and Sen. McCain, she does have executive experience as a mayor, the head of a state commission, and a governor. And she has proven that she will take on entrenched political factions and win.

So the jury is still out on that question. But the opposition must have been worried, given its frenzied attack strategy.

Suddenly stepping down as governor in mid-term, however, has everyone wondering what is going on, including her supporters. Even the most positive evaluations say this move is risky if Mrs. Palin hopes to have a future in politics. With the decision to walk away, she has branded herself a “quitter,” despite whatever good reasons she may have for stepping down. And, predictably, her enemies are having a field day playing guessing games.

She’s fed up with the pettiness of her opposition and with the nastiness of politics, and the toll her sudden prominence has taken on her children, who are supposed to be off limits from the normal sewer-tactics of the political game. In her statement last Friday, she said: “Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I’ve been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations – such as holding a fish in a photograph, wearing a jacket with a logo on it, and answering reporters’ questions. Every one – all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed.” But there are still hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills to pay. Who could blame her for wanting to escape that?

But maybe there is something ugly lying beneath the surface yet to be discovered, an actual scandal, instead of a made-up scandal. Right now, nobody knows for sure, and until something substantive actually comes to light, everyone would be well advised to keep quiet, behave themselves, and make an honest effort to be mature, responsible adults.

There is a strong feeling that those expectations are too high.

Cross-Posted from Observations

Media Palin Assault Strategy Inadvertently Revealed

Before political correctness emerged as the dominant MSM ethic, it was called “Chinese Water Torture.” Water is slowly dripped onto a person's forehead until the person is driven insane, or in the case of McCain/Palin, until Palin is driven off the ticket.

Craig Gordon of Newsday let it slip:

The real danger for Palin would come if this revelation were the first of a steady drip of stories . . .

Here’s what Peter Wallsten of the LA Times wrote:

One Republican strategist with close ties to the campaign described the candidate's closest supporters as "keeping their fingers crossed" in hopes that additional information does not force McCain to revisit the decision. . .

The story about Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy is clearly too dangerous for the Obama folks (including the MSM media) to dwell upon in the long term. Expect media focus to intensify on Alaska’s state ethics investigation of Palin in the the so-called "Troopergate” or “ Wootengate” controversy involving the firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. Monegan claims that he was fired because he was reluctant to fire an Alaska state trooper, Mike Wooten, Palin's former brother-in-law, who has been involved in a bitter custody fight with her younger sister. Palin’s staff had contacted Walt Monegan about two dozen times about Wooten.

Here’s an excerpt of a piece of “News Analysis” by Peter Wallsten, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer:

. . .The youthful mother of five whose placement on the ticket was meant to reinforce traditional values has now revealed that her unmarried teenage daughter is pregnant -- a piece of information that the family and the campaign said they had hoped to keep private. . . .

The woman introduced to America as a reform-minded Washington outsider who opposed the infamous "bridge to nowhere" -- the symbol of McCain's hatred of wasteful spending -- originally supported its construction. The governor who in her introductory speech decried the practice of budgetary "earmarks" sought, as the state's chief executive and as mayor of Wasilla, hundreds of millions of dollars in such federal funding for local projects.

Moreover, Palin has now retained a lawyer to represent her in a controversy the McCain campaign said it had fully researched -- Palin's role in dismissing a state police official who had refused to fire a trooper who divorced Palin's sister.

On Monday, the McCain campaign dispatched lawyers to Alaska in a move described as an attempt to manage a growing crowd of journalists who have traveled there to inspect Palin's background. But the move raises the impression that the McCain campaign didn't know everything about his No. 2 and is now racing to learn what it can while trying to avoid tough questions about the Arizona senator's decision-making process. . . .

One Republican strategist with close ties to the campaign described the candidate's closest supporters as "keeping their fingers crossed" in hopes that additional information does not force McCain to revisit the decision. According to this Republican, who would discuss internal campaign strategizing only on condition of anonymity, the McCain team used little more than a Google Internet search as part of a rushed effort to review Palin's potential pitfalls. Just over a week ago, Palin was not on McCain's short list of potential running mates, the Republican said. . . .

Critics continue to question why McCain, after months of assailing Democratic nominee Barack Obama as lacking foreign policy experience, would tap a running mate who has been governor for less than two years and before that was mayor of Wasilla, population 7,000.

The campaign has little room for error. A new CBS News poll found that 66% of registered voters were undecided about Palin. . . .

Here’s an excerpt from Newsday by Craig Gordon:

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Sarah Palin was on a roll, fresh-faced and fiery, just the boost of energy John McCain's slow-but-steady campaign needed.
Now that's over.

So far anyway, it doesn't look as if news that Palin has a pregnant teenage daughter is enough to knock her off McCain's ticket. . . .

Many experts said Palin could weather the story about her daughter because most voters are willing to accept that it's a private, family matter. "She going to get three strikes, and this is one," said independent analyst Charles Cook.
The real danger for Palin would come if this revelation were the first of a steady drip of stories - and already, news came out yesterday of her husband's long-ago drunken-driving charge and the fact that she hired a lawyer to defend herself in an ethics probe in Alaska. . . .

It also dramatically raises the stakes for Palin's acceptance speech to the nation, originally scheduled for tomorrow night. No longer is that speech merely a high-energy, get-to-know-you address, like her appearance Friday as McCain's running mate. Now it becomes a closely watched moment where the country will try to take her measure - as a possible president, and perhaps, rightly or wrongly, as a mother. . . .

And just as the Palin pick all but dared Democrats to challenge her credentials as a two-year Alaska governor, some Republican strategists yesterday said Democrats will pay the price if their activist supporters point out that the "family values" party has a teen pregnancy in the family.
Obama saw the dangers of that yesterday, issuing a statement where he said Palin's daughter was off-limits in the campaign - and noted he was born to an 18-year-old mother, just a year older than Bristol Palin.

See Associated Press take on the McCain camp's detailed review of Palin

Here’s an excerpt:

. . . In the days since, Republicans and Democrats have privately questioned whether the Arizona senator chose the first-term governor without fully looking into her background. McCain's campaign has vehemently defended the review.

Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr., the lawyer who conducted the review, told The Associated Press in an interview Monday that Palin underwent a "full and complete" examination before McCain chose her. Asked whether everything that came up as a possible red flag during the review already has been made public, Culvahouse said: "I think so. Yeah, I think so. Correct."

Stoking the notion of a rushed examination, a timeline issued by the campaign indicated that McCain initially met Palin in February, then held one phone conversation with her last week before inviting her to Arizona, where he met with her a second time and offered her the job.

Raising additional questions was the campaign's disclosure Monday that Palin's unmarried 17-year-old daughter was pregnant, and reports that Palin's husband, Todd, had been arrested in 1986, when he was 22, for driving under the influence of alcohol.

McCain's campaign has dispatched a team of a dozen communications operatives and lawyers to Alaska.

Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser, said the campaign always planned to send a "jump team" to the eventual running mate's home state to work with the nominee's staff, help with information requests from local and national reporters, and answer questions about documents that were part of the review. . . .

The public search also unearthed details of the Legislature's investigation into the dismissal of Alaska's public safety commissioner, allegedly because he would not fire Palin's former brother-in-law as a state trooper.

Culvahouse said he asked follow-up questions, and "spent a lot of time with her lawyer" on the matter.

"We came out of it knowing all that we could know at the time," he said.

Throughout the process, the campaign said, Davis had multiple conversations with Palin.