Posted by
Bill Crawford on Wednesday, August 25, 2010 8:27:02 PM
Even her detractors grudgingly admit Ms. Palin has a talent. In the last Presidential campaign, she was an advance man's dream: don't bother hawking any seats, just find the biggest arena available and announce when she will be there.
And she wasn't a drag on the ticket. Au contraire, John picked up a few close states and stayed competitive in a few others because she was there. His fund raising was in a doldrum until the day after she showed up. McCain lost when the economy went south in September.
Anyway, Sarah is some sort of lone wolf adventurer. She lives by her rules. She wants to support the candidates she chooses? Who's to stop her? She wants to continue promoting her book and work as a Fox News consultant? You don't like it? Too bad.
Her game is not geared to building a string of winners, either. In fact, her pet candidates are less than even money at this point. She seems to hanker towards people who are nowhere to be seen and drag them into real competition. Then, it's up to them to do something with it. This I've never seen before.
This morning was different. The Alaska GOP Senatorial primary was yesterday. The prohibitive favorite was Lisa Murkowski, Senatorial appointee of and daughter of Frank Mulkowski, the Governor who Sarah took down in the bitter GOP Governor primary in 2006.
Sarah stayed in until the end on this one, bringing newcomer Joe Miller from nowhere to a probable 5000 vote victory yesterday. That is probably the biggest upset of the year so far. It was the one I least expected.
Was it personal for her? Maybe. The Palins and the Murkowskis have not been on speaking terms for a while. The point is, she showed what she could do when she drove for the finish and threw all her chips in. People in both parties have already noticed this.
Sarah still has her serious problems. Her negatives are horrendous. For every flyover country type who has a picture in their garage of her dressed in camis and brandishing an M-16, there is an urbanite who thinks the Tina Fey caricature is actually real. They are convvinced Sarah is a combination of George W. Bush's dumb and Newt Gingrich's arrogant. They would all consider quitting their jobs for thrree months to campaign against her, if she ran for President. That is a hard nut to crack.
She will run, eventually. When she is older, more nuanced, more willing to take direction from a savvy campaign manager and less likely to fall prey to the soft sexism that still exists here in many that a babe can't also be a leader.
In the meantime, she will be a hell of a kingmaker. The debate still ongoing in the GOP between the tea party types and everybody else will be won by the tea partiers- because she will be the wind at their backs. Whether they can govern with their new majority next year is up to them, but if they can, she will be the single biggest force that makes that happen. And there will be debts to pay for that.