According to Palin it was because her enemies were constantly attacking her and that was hurting Alaska. And she wanted to spend time promoting the causes she supports in other ways.
One of her jobs has been helping certain people get elected. Go have a look at her track record.
Yes, she’s doing a good job.
If one of her jobs is to help unhinge the left, she’s doing a great job.
Cite that any of the people she’s helped have been elected? Because she sure as hell didn’t help McCain.
According to this list, of the people Palin endorsed, 13 have won or are leading, only four lost. A few of the races were turned by Palin - Terry Bransted and Nicky Haley were both losing until Palin endorsed them. Both surged immediately after her endorsement.
However, many of these races were Republican primaries. It remains to be seen if she has that kind of pull in the general election. I suspect that in some states her endorsement might help, and in others it will hurt.
She is being very savvy, though. She has traded on her popularity to bring in millions of dollars to her political PAC, and she is using that money to help fund campaigns of people she supports. That translates into political support down the road - if those people win, she gains their ground operation for her own campaign if she decides to run. This whole strategy of hers is creating a large national ground movement loyal to her. That, and her PAC money makes her a kingmaker in conservative circles, and even if she doesn’t run she can parlay that into a cabinet appointment, or a position as head of the RNC, or whatever she is looking for.
For a “dumb woman”, she is outmanoevering just about everyone else on the Republican side.
What I got from her long, rambling quit speech was that she didn’t want to have to swim upstream with the fishes…or something to that effect. 
I know why she claimed to be resigning.
That remains to be seen. As you not, Palin has put her political capital behind some candidates that other Republicans have avoided. The results haven’t come in yet.
If the candidates she’s endorsed end up winning, then she’ll gain the results you say. But if they lose the general election, then Palin will have shown that she’s irrelevant. The more mainstream Republican leaders who didn’t sign on with these candidates will grow in influence while Palin’s influence will decline.
That’s certainly a possible outcome. But given her results so far, you’d have to call her strategy a roaring success.
But the results so far are thin. Of the twenty-five candidates listed as being supported by her only four have been in a general election. Three won and one lost. Of the three that won, Chambliss, Christie, and McDonnell were all Republican candidates who were backed by the Republican mainstream. Palin isn’t going to be singled out for supporting any of them.
The fourth candidate was Doug Hoffman. Republican candidate Dierdre Scozzafava was running against Democratic candidate Bill Owens for a House seat. Hoffman decided to run against both candidates as a Conservative. Palin was one of the national figures who supported him.
The result was a disaster. Scozzafava dropped out but it was Owens not Hoffman who won the election. (And one of the factors in Hoffman’s defeat was that he was considered to be “owned” by national figures like Palin.) New York’s 23rd had been considered one of the safest seats in Congress - it hadn’t elected a Democrat in over 130 years. And Palin was a major figure in losing it.
The results aren’t thin at all. So far, her record is 13-4. Her endorsement turned several races.
As for the general election, that’s simply an unknown at this point, although the early indications aren’t bad for her. But more importantly, you have to look at success from her perspective - everyone thought she’d fade away after the last election, but instead she’s become arguably the most powerful person in Conservative circles. She’s got a new book coming out soon. Her last one was a smash best seller. She’s probably the most highly paid speaker in the country, and she’s become a kingmaker in the Republican party. I can’t imagine how she could be more successful.
Now, it could go horribly wrong for her still. She could run in 2012 and embarrass herself and destroy Republican gains and lose all the momentum she has. But that’s the future, and we can only judge her success so far.
Things were looking good for Al Gore and John Kerry too. Right up to the point where George Bush got elected instead.
That’s what politics is about. It’s not about who gets the most donations or who wins the primary or who gets nominated or who ran stronger than expected and might be a factor in four years. It’s about who gets elected to office.
On the score, Palin has a weak 3-1 record.
A 3-1 record is weak?
How about her best-selling book? Her status as de-facto leader of the conservative movement? Her megabuck speaking fees? Her FOX news gig?
Really, I know you dislike Palin. I personally have lots of misgivings about her. But try to see past that, and look at what she’s actually accomplished.
I remember people on this board saying that the fact that Obama was running such a great campaign was enough executive experience to be president. I assume those people won’t extend the same judgment to Palin, but so far you can’t deny her success.
Her record in national elections is 0-1.
Yes, she’s very popular with right wing morons. We know that. But that’s ALL she is. She isn’t running anything, not even a campaign. She markets herself to a very narrow segmnt of the population and confines her media exposure to the very friendly confines of Fox News. She hasn’t done an interview with anyone outside the right wing media since the election. She has a very cozy fan base, but in terms of national politics it’s a small one, and it has no room for expansion. Palin is the most disliked political personality in the US (Obama’s favorability still dwarfs Palin’s), and even most Republicans now say she’s not qualified to be President.
It is for the reasons I stated. The three winners were widely supported by the Republican mainstream. Palin was just part of the crowd. None of those three owe anything special to Palin for their victories.
The fourth one was the only one where Palin’s role was decisive. That was an election where she did influence the outcome. And because of her, the Republicans lost a seat in Congress that should have been a slam dunk.
What about them? She has a following. So does the head of the Libertarian party. The question is whether she can use her following to get people elected.
My point is that politically she hasn’t accomplished anything yet. Right now she’s just potential.
That would have been a fair claim two years ago. But then there was an election. And Obama succeeded in getting elected which proved his strategy worked. In a few years maybe Palin’s strategy will succeed. But you can’t claim that Palin is a success now because she might succeed in the future.
It seems to me you are choosing to define ‘success’ very narrowly here. We don’t even know if she’ll run in 2012. Saying she can’t be called successful unless she wins in 2012 or otherwise affects that election is crazy. She’s already very successful on her own terms. For example she stated as one of her goals to bring more women into Republican politics. To that end, she endorsed several women, all of whom won, including one who was losing until Palin endorsed her.
She also wanted to help tea partiers upset the old boy’s network in the Republican party, and she did that as well, turning around several primary challenges by tea partiers over Republicans.
Dio doesn’t think she runs anything, but in fact she’s got quite a large organization now. SarahPAC is raising millions.
Anyone who looks at what she’s done in the last 18 months and says with a straight face that she hasn’t been successful is simply blinded by partisanship.
SarahPAC might be raising a lot of money, but it doesn’t seem to be putting a lot of it behind candidates for national office.
She doesn’t actually run SarahPac, nor did she write her own book (unlike Obama).
The question was not “is she successful,” but “is she doing a good job?” A good job at what? The only real job she has is as a “political analyst” (i.e. GOP shill) on Fox News, and she’s pretty awful at that if you measure it in terms of actual knowledge and insight. I don’t even think she’s a very effective demagogue when she says things like we should let the Dutch come and stop the oil leak in the gulf because they know how to plug dikes.
The only thing she’s been succesful at is exploiting her own cult of personality among a closed segment of unlettered and embittered unsophisticates vulnerable to the fear mongering, race baiting and faux populist demagoguery of the hard right. She can’t grow her fan base, and everyone of any actual political consequence in the GOP is fully aware that she has no capability to comprehend or exercise any real political power.
Her political career is done. At this point, she is basically just another right wing, pop media personality, no different than Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck. She can continue to make money at that, as long as her looks hold up and people keep writing books for her, running her websites and prepping her for her "analysis’ segments on Bill O’Reilly, but she’s never going to do anything more than that.
I don’t think being elected to office is a narrow definition of success in politics. To me it’s the broadest possible definition of the term that has any meaning.
Suppose I ran the Green Party. If you want to run for any office as a Green you have to come see me and take my terms. Every nominee in the Green Party is the candidate I picked.
Would that make me a Kingmaker? No, because none of the people I controlled ever gets elected. For all my “power” within the Green Party, I don’t have enough real power to call up the mayor of my hometown and get my street plowed.
The other side of the Kingmaker coin is how much influence you really have.
Let’s suppose this time that I run a barbershop. In 2008, I told every one of my customers who was over eightteen that they should vote for Barack Obama in November. Should I have been expected to get an Ambassadorship when he got elected?
To be a Kingmaker you have to show that you control enough votes to get people elected to office. That your influence will be a factor in whether or not a candidate gets to put his or her hand on the Bible.
Sarah Palin has not yet achieved this status. By her own account, only three people she has supported have been elected to office. And none of them needed her support to get elected.
Whatever, guys. We’re clearly not going to agree on this. I think your definition of success is crazy, but since there’s no hard definition, we might as well drop it. Maybe we can pick up the discussion again after November.
I’d say success for her is possible, but a lower success than she was shooting for in the 2008 election. A political success for her would just be inspiring enough Republicans to vote to win back some of the House.
Oddly enough, most of my friends like Palin but voted for Obama. And now they actually have more of a beef against Obama, and don’t care about Palin except as much as they care about other people on their beloved Fox News.