Quotes of the day

“I’ve had about an hour to process everything, and I just want to tell everyone that we must keep up the good fight.

“Because everything we’ve stood for these past three years … It’s not over. Governor Palin set the standard. She gave us the VISION of what we wanted in a leader. Now it’s still up to us to make that vision a reality. If we can’t have Sarah, we will fight to make Sarah’s issues front and center in the GOP nomination, we will force whoever DOES emerge to embrace her vision of reform, and ethics, and fiscal responsibility.

“She created an ARMY of Sarahs … and eventually one of us will finish what she started. Someday…

“We remain UNDEFEATED.”

“Sarah Palin kept her decision not to enter the 2012 presidential race shrouded in secrecy until the last minute — even to her closest confidantes.

“ABC News has learned that members of Palin’s staff were only very recently informed that she wouldn’t be running and that an announcement would likely come on Wednesday, but they were not informed of the exact details of how the information would be released…

“As recently, as Tuesday afternoon Palin staffers still did not know if she was running and were keeping abreast of primary filing deadlines.”

“‘WE NEED YOU,’ Nashville supporter Mike Marshall posted, echoing hundreds of supporters on Palin’s Facebook wall who, within minutes, bared their feelings on her decision online.

“Some were furious, like Chris Atwood of Carlsbad, N.M.

“‘I am very disappointed!!! Once the liberals get ahold of this they will hammer you all over again,’ he wrote. ‘You are an amazing woman and what we need to get this country going the right way.’…

“But the majority of the comments that took over Palin’s Facebook were supportive of Palin, who said she planned to have an impact in the race without holding an elected office…

“‘Sorry to hear, you had my vote,’ Sheryl Gray Hettinger of Asheboro, N.C., wrote. ‘Maybe 2016?'”

“What, in the end, has Palin contributed to the political discourse? She is not identified with any overriding issue; indeed, issues have always been secondary to her persona. What Palin has pursued is the politics of grievance, conveying the notion that ‘they’—the establishment, the elites, the academics, the MSM, the condescending inquisitors who demand to know what newspapers she reads—are out of touch with the real America. She channeled the anti-Obama sentiment out there in a more visceral way than any of her potential rivals…

“Had Palin acknowledged months ago that she had no plans to run for president, the traveling circus would have moved on, dimming the lights that surround her. She would not have been on the cover of Newsweek. She had every incentive to keep the threat alive, and so too did her chroniclers, not wanting to surrender her as an inimitable character in the political wars.

“There will be much talk now about how Palin can still impact the ‘debate,’ about the uses of her megaphone, about who she might endorse. But most of that talk will be empty. Sarah Palin will continue to be a huge star, perhaps serve as a party fundraiser, but her days as a powerbroker, and serious political player, are over. She has at long last ended the pretense, and now can resume the lucrative business of marketing the one product she excels at promoting: herself.”

“The bottom line is that it seems to me that you have made the right moral decision for all the wrong reasons. Ironically, you think you are preserving your political career by not exposing yourself to a potentially embarrassing loss, but in reality you are ending it. This is the exact conclusion for which the seeds were sown during your resignation. As you recall, my warnings about such an inevitability began a rift between us that ultimately resulted in the end of over two years of colorful and consequential contact.

“As someone who attended your spectacular convention speech and who put their fortune, career and reputation on the line in your defense, this is a very sad day for me. There is no doubt that you were dealt a horrible hand by a media determined to destroy you because you were once a threat to Obama. You made choices in dealing with your situation which have secured your family’s financial future and insured that you will always have a gig on television, but these decisions have also extinguished a flame which had the potential to light the conservative path for a generation. I still believe that had you stuck it out and remained as governor of Alaska things could have been very different today.”

“‘To tell you the truth, I made my announcement today, in the format that I did, because that was his [Christie’s] seven millionth no and I didn’t want to go through all of that. I wanted to just kind of put the marker down and say no, I’m not running, not have a big press conference about it, not make a big darn deal about it, because this isn’t about me, and it’s not about Chris Christie,’ Palin said, adding that it was about Americans working to get good people elected.”

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