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November 07, 2008 09:47 AM UTC

In Defense of Sarah Palin

  • 24 Comments
  • by: ThillyWabbit

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

It should now be clear to everyone across the political spectrum that Sarah Palin was a disastrous pick for the VP slot. Most of us saw that before the election, which is why Palin went quickly from having superstar status to being a serious drag on the McCain ticket. But the evidence coming out in the days after the election of her profligacy, lack of basic knowledge about things like NAFTA and Africa that a C-student in American Government would know, and reports of her serious attitude problems, it should be utterly clear to even hyper-Republican partisans that Palin was the worst possible choice.

But here’s the problem: all of this evidence now coming to light is coming from hyper-Republican partisans. In fact, it’s coming from the same partisans who picked her in the first place, in a bizarre attempt to cover their own backsides. These are smart people; they should understand that in a circular firing squad, the backside is not the side they should be worried about.

It’s not Sarah Palin’s fault that John McCain picked a “Wasilla hillbilly looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.” If you don’t want a Wasilla hillbilly, you don’t hire one to be the VP candidate. Sarah Palin is who she is. She didn’t become who she is over the last nine weeks.

Choosing the Vice President is the single most undemocratic step in our electoral process. The VP candidate is not vetted by the voters in any kind of primary campaign. It’s a step that should be completed with care and precision, and it wasn’t.

Sarah Palin was John McCain’s choice. John McCain should rein the people who would trash talk her as the reason he lost. She may be, but they picked her. She may be a corrupt moron, but she was their corrupt moron. Pulling a slash-and-burn on her now serves no purpose. It’s not going to save anybody’s reputation. They should be looking at themselves, not at her, for answers about their colossal failure.

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24 thoughts on “In Defense of Sarah Palin”

  2. John McCain should rein the people who would trash talk her as the reason he lost.

    John McCain is going to go into a hole in the ground until the new Senate session in January. It would be appropriate for him to act like a leader and defend her, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

    My question is when this is going to stop being a story? We have actual, real work to do to make this country work again.

    2. There is the matter of the past: How and Why did this happen?

      There is the matter of the future: What influence will the Palinites have on electoral process and Ms. Sarah’s ambitions.  She obviously likes being in the limelight whether she should be or not, whether she has something to offer or not.  

      1. of whenever I’m sitting in bumper to bumper traffic on northbound I-25 thinking that it must be some grizzly accident, but in reality everyone’s slowing down to see the SUV stalled in the right lane.

    3. the Palin story is certainly not going to prevent anybody in the Office of the President Elect from doing their jobs.  It’s not like the media does “real work” to “make this country work” anyway, right?  And they only people talking about this are the media, the bloggers, and a few R’s who don’t have jobs and wouldn’t be asked for their advice even if they did.

      1. than some altruistic hope that the media/blogosphere would start talking about the pressing issues.

        Obviously some people didn’t get their laughs for the 9 weeks that she was the VP candidate.

          1. That’s why it’s important to keep all of this crap on record, we’ll need something to remind people.

            I also agree with DavidThi808’s assessments of her, but don’t think that lack of intellectual curiosity is a guaranteed loss.  Bush’s election scare the hell out me and will continue to while Palin is around.

            It’s possible that the GOP did learn something… from Rev. Wright.  The sooner you get these things over and done with, the better.  Maybe their hope is that in four years everyone will think of this as old news.

          2. I’ve joked about her, I won’t deny it.

            But I think the way that the McCain campaign people are treating her now is complete bullshit, and I don’t see why everyone has to continue to freak out about her.

            And I am not underestimating Governor Palin. Your admiration for her is the only evidence anyone should need to know that she’s not going anywhere.

  3. The smartest thing for the group to do is shut up. However, the best thing for an individual is to trash talk the others, and everyone else shuts up. So…

    Everyone does what’s best for themselves, but in so doing they’re all worse off than if they all just kept quiet.

    As to McCain, I don’t think he owes Palin that much. He himself has been very respectful toward her while she worried mostly about her own self-interest.

    1. Remember McCain’s behavior after the Keating 5 story broke? He basically trashed everyone else who was in the room, leaking nastygrams to the press, and generally positioning himself up as the naive, well-meaning public servant just trying to help out a constituent (while helping himself to some quality time in the Bahamas).

      Sound familiar?

      After an incredibly graceful and conciliatory concession speech Tuesday night, I’d like to cut him some slack. However, throughout this entire campaign, his campaign has thrown one person after another under the wheels of the straight talk express, including Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. Why do you expect them to change now.

  5. John McCain was never in control of his sloppy, lurching, erratic campaign. That much is clear. He floundered as a leader, exhibiting absolutely no executive skills, from the beginning.   It’s unrealistic to expect him to be able to rein anyone in any more than he has been able to throughout the process.  Another reason to be grateful he isn’t our President-elect. As for Palin, I completely agree with redstateblues.  

  6. …that is isn’t Mitt Romney who is behind all of this.  

    The man has all the class of a slimy used car salesman and I wouldn’t put it past him to defame Palin in an attempt to clear his path to be the GOP candidate in ’12.

  7. Was thinking about posting my own “in defense of SP” blog, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, given my vitriolic enmity against Kristi Burton — whom Sarah Palin mirrors on a national level. But this post has given me the extra-hard nudge I needed to come to her defense.

    Interesting that many of the allegations that are coming from within the Republican ranks are similar to the questions that were raised immediately after she was picked, but that those same Republican ranks pointed to as partisan, sexist attacks. Kind of smacks as “Do as I say, not as I do” for the Republican insiders to portray her after-the-fact as not qualified for the job, while they were tying themselves into knots trying to make everyone else believe the ludicrous claim that she had more experience than anyone on the Democratic ticket.

    Interesting that John McCain, who claimed that he always puts country first (by the way, isn’t this something that someone else should say about you? it’s kind of like making up your own nickname — takes all credibility away) and that he had the leadership experience necessary to be the commander in chief, selected a running mate who divided the country yet he stubbornly refused to acknowledge that impact on the race. Even worse, after a very graceful concession speech on Election Night — if McCain had acted that way on the campaign trail, the race may have been much tighter and we may have even had a different outcome — he’s awfully quick to cede any form of leadership of his own party and is likewise willing to stand quietly by as his pick for the #2 spot has her character publicly denigrated by his campaign team.

    In less than a week, McCain has demonstrated all those claims of being a maverick who will take on the GOP were empty promises uttered to appeal to voters. In less than a week, McCain also has shown that any of the “united for a common purpose” or “leave no one behind” mentality that is supposed to resonate with all military personnel means absolutely nothing to him when it comes to his own running mate.

    The fact that McCain’s not willing to stand by his selection of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential pick is so much more revealing of his willingness to forego his own principles than it is of Sarah Palin’s alleged character flaws. If I were any of the 99 colleagues in the U.S. Senate who will be working with him when Congress reconvenes, I’d think more than twice about negotiating with McCain and expecting him to stand by his position or to defend the agreement publicly.

    1. It goes to basic competence to hold any public office.

      Add the fact that Palin was elected governor of Alaska on an anti-corruption platform, only to be found by an ethics committee to have committed ethics violations herself in her first two years in office already, and there is nothing to recommend her.

      1. The point, though, is that McCain picked her in the first place. She didn’t exploit, blackmail, or otherwise muscle her way onto the ticket. If she did, that would be the story.

        McCain chose to disregard the already pending investigation into her firing of the public safety commissioner. McCain ignored the fact that she hadn’t been publicly vetted, even through a leak-that’s-not-really-a-leak leak. McCain disregarded the fact that she had a pregnant teenage daughter (he told us Palin had disclosed that before she was selected, remember), which belies Palin’s abstinence-only attitude on sex education. McCain swallowed the kool-aid provided by whatever advisor told him he should pick an untested, unknown, evangelical right-winger because he needed to solidify the support of that part of the Republican vote — even though that demographic of voters would never vote for Obama. Then McCain OK’d the campaign tactic of trying to sell the American electorate the story that Palin was more tested and able to lead than either Obama or Biden because she had less than 2 years of executive experience as governor of Alaska — never mind that argument would mean she also has more experienced than John McCain.

        McCain’s decision; McCain should take responsibility for it, instead of allowing her to be portrayed as the scapegoat. Isn’t that part of the Republican mantra of personal responsbility, not government hand-outs?

  8. “John McCain should rein the people who would trash talk her as the reason he lost. She may be, but they picked her. She may be a corrupt moron, but she was their corrupt moron. Pulling a slash-and-burn on her now serves no purpose. It’s not going to save anybody’s reputation.”

    McCain picked her; they didn’t, and therein lies the rub.  McCain staffers are reaffirming that point that the stupid mistake that McCain made in appointing Palin was one he made unilaterally, either without, or contrary to, their advice.  They want to demonostrate that it wasn’t the staff that was stupid.

    Protecting McCain no longer serves any purpose for the Republican party or his staff.  Protecting the personal reputations of the staff, who make up a large share of the best and brightest of the next generation of Republican leaders, means a fair amount for both them individually and for the Republican part as well.

    Further, as people who have a vested interest in giving the GOP a next generation of high profile leaders who are competent, they have every reason to trash Palin in an effort to discourage her from rising to greater prominence in the party.  Failing to kiss and tell could result in her being given an opportunity that she doesn’t deserve and then suffering defeat when she screws up that opportunity.

    1. They’re worried that Palin will return from her time in the wilderness much more prepared for the national stage – and then all of these people will find themselves on the outs.

      I think they’re very scared of her potential.

  9. then the only people in on the decision were McCain, Rick Davis and Schmidt.  Certainly Davis and Schmidt are not the ones whispering to the media right now about Palin.  Must be the bitter rest of the staff who were left out of it.

  10. From New York Times article “Palin Returns to a Different Alaska”:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11…

    Oil prices, which provide the bulk of state revenue, were well over $100 a barrel in late August when Ms. Palin left to campaign with Senator John McCain. Now they are slumming south of $60 a barrel, below the level required to balance the state budget. Increased scrutiny of Ms. Palin’s time as governor often painted an unflattering portrait of her administration…

    “She’s coming back to a divided state, where Democrats had supported her but they watched her for two months call the president-elect of the United States a terrorist sympathizer,” said State Representative Les Gara, Democratic of Anchorage. “She called him a socialist.”

    Her partisanship also surprised some conservative Republicans, who were accustomed to feeling ignored while Ms. Palin nurtured alliances with Democrats and moderate Republicans. Now, some Republicans who have been at odds with Ms. Palin in the past are wondering if her partisan tone on the campaign trail might mean they will have her ear more than before.

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