How many Presidents with time in the Senate turned out to be effective executives? The Senate reinforces practices & habits that make for crappy presidencies: micromanagement; indecisiveness; endless talk; reflexive bipartisanship; fondness for pork; and a sclerotic Beltway mindset divorced from reality.

A huge part of Sarah’s appeal comes from being one of us. She’s not soaked in the slime that taints DC denizens. The strength of a person’s common sense is inversely related to the amount of time they spend in Washington. After four years of President Moonbeam, we’re going to need Sarah’s common sense.

She should keep doing what she’s doing.

Work in the book release and tour, keep the op-eds coming when Obama does something stupid (which should be at least once or twice a month).

By the time 2012 primary time is here, the Republican base will be %80 in her corner. Then what will the party elites do, without the voters? They will have no choice but to follow the people they expect to vote Republican.

Things are moving so much faster now than they did back in the ’70′s, ’80′s or even GWB’s first term.

If Sarah Palin plays her cards just right, she can have this image redefinition process moving much faster than most people seem to be willing to believe right now.

There is a big wave coming, and she knows how to ride it, if that is what she ultimately decides to do.
Maybe she has already decided, who knows.

It sure will be fun watching her do her thing, no matter the path she takes.
I just really enjoy this lady’s presence, she gives me hope that all is not lost.

I know one thing for sure: if Sarah ends up not running in 2012 herself, she will decide who the nominee will be.

THAT has got to be rankling some DC apparatchiks on both sides, and I love it.

Republican elites walked away from her, because she’s not like them. They’ll do so again.

A lot of folks aren’t old enough to remember this, and some who are didn’t notice at the time; but you know who else was trashed, absolutely smashmouth spit upon, by the Republican elites?

You’re way ahead of me: Ronald Wilson Reagan. Even members of Reagan’s own cabinet constantly whined and kvetched to the press (I’m thinking particularly of Secretary of the Treasury, then Chief of Staff Donald Regan and Secretary of State George Schultz).

The “country-club conservatives” had desperately wanted George H.W. Bush to be the nominee in 1980… and they were scared to death of Reagan. Many thought he was a total nutjob. Imagine, thinking that the Soviet Union was tottering and could be knocked over with a single solid push! Reagan was a fool, an actor, a hick from the sticks: He grew up in rural Illinois and attended Eureka College; Regan — from Cambridge, MA, graduate of Harvard, former Merrill Lynch’s chairman and CEO — and Schultz — NYC, Princeton, PhD from MIT — were very unimpressed.

Honest to Betsy, DB, it’s no particular drawback to be hated by the despised Republican (and Democratic) establishments; those are the very people that everyone loves to hate. The Democratic establishment today comprises Pelosi, Reid, Murtha, Dodd, Frank, Hoyer, and of course Howard “Bicycle Path” Dean.

Reagan ran against the GOP establishment; remember, he almost unseated Gerald Ford for the nomination in 1976, and Ford was the incumbent!

An awful lot of Republicans bet against Reagan in 1979 and 1980, especially when he boycotted the first few multi-candidate debates. An awful lot of them are betting against Palin now, and for the same reason: She’s not one of them. (Of course, they are the ones who messed up so badly they were slaughtered in 2006 and 2008 — weren’t they?)

I will bet that when Palin takes charge of defining herself, she will very quickly reverse those negatives into positives. At that point, the Republican elites had better start swimmin’, or they’ll sink like a stone.

Dafydd

That gives the extreme haters all the cover they like to drive up her negatives, which they will. They hate her deeply, because she didn’t kill Trig, and they would have. They can glory in their “hysterical”, “head-exploding”, “vomiting” rage – all self-descriptions by respectable critics – because they don’t risk their respectability, because she doesn’t have the establishment allies she needs to impose social costs for that sort of hate.

Unopposed demonization works fine, politically. It worked on George W. Bush. It’ll keep working in Sarah Palin.

It’s unjust. But it will be very hard for her to achieve anything in the face of a party elite that would rather accommodate themselves to a progressive agenda than let a hick from the sticks win.

I do not believe Sarah Palin is going to be President.

I think the writing was on the wall, at latest, when McCain staffers continued to back-stab her after his defeat, and he did nothing to stop it or punish them. By blowing off that disloyalty, he damned himself in the eyes of some people, including me. But he also showed how far party elites will go to undercut Palin, and one of the consequences. Anyone on her staff who leaks or in other ways exhibits disloyalty will get cover. They’ll be able to move on to good jobs with other members of the establishment, because yes they’ll have betrayed a Republican but not one of us.

I don’t know how conservatives can get a good candidate in 2012. I don’t see one.