I’m not sure it has stopped. McCain is tarred by association. I will not be surprised to see a Reaganesque blowout.
Rush Limburger makes a fortune playing to the right wing nuts. There is room in there for a woman with a weak conscience. She will say whatever they want. She will get rich and like Rush convince herself that she is telling the truth to the uninformed. If she were on the stock market. I would suggest buying some. She is not going away.
I’ll look, but that was more an aggregate of what I have been hearing and seeing in the liberal media. But the AP poll link to by **Voyager **should be a partial cite. I heard reports that she had an adverse effect specifically in NJ & Florida.
Pollster.com has an interesting article dating to the Sep 5th& Oct 8th.
Without conducting my own scientific poll, I don’t believe I can completely cite what I said, but the decrease in Palin numbers does tie in nicely to the Katie Couric interview. This is pretty simple. Couric is generally considered a light weight and Palin could not hold her own and actually embarrassed her self to some degree.
Just to clarify my earlier post on Walter Mondale. I interpreted ‘success’ to mean the losing candidate had a future with the national party. So, by those terms Mondale was successful in capturing the 1984 nomination. Other losing candidates on the national ticket haven’t done well. Gore probably could have had the 2004 nomination if he would have wanted it, but we’ll never know. Kerry, Edwards, Lieberman, Kemp, Dukakis, Bensten. and Dan Quayle haven’t been able to do much at the national party level since losing their elections. The last person to lose on a national level and get another chance was Mondale and before him was Bob Dole.
Nixon, of course, was the last person to lose and then come back to be on a winning ticket.
Unfortunately, she’s going to be vice president for the next four years, at least. Then when it’s Gore vs McCain in 2012, she’ll be on the same ticket once more. After that, she’ll be running for President I’d guess.
Don’t worry, we all make wrong predictions sometimes.
I agree. Naked ambition is not exactly a hindrance in pursuing a political career. If Palin wins reelection she’ll have a little more credibility to run for Senate or perhaps be Secretary of Energy in a future Republican administration.
I don’t know if Palin would make a serious run for a place on the national ticket again, but losing as VP didn’t hurt Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Quayle was Bush Sr.'s attempt to inject glamor (relatively speaking) into the ticket but he was also a well-established party workhorse. He’d earned some serious cred inside the party for both gathering a solid base and paying his dues. Palin hasn’t. She was flashdanced into prominence past too many candidates who were much better qualified. They know it, knew from the start she was a gamble even if she still doesn’t.
I don’t think actual causes will matter much, especially if this election morphs into a Democratic blowout as some are predicting now. Economic implosion may be the strongest factor but Palin will be the symbol. What else is left? Bush’s two terms? Way too much uncomfortable baggage for that. They won’t blame McCain. Purported maverick or not, he’s a solid, long-time party Name. Between the two , he’s the Grand Old Man. She’s the flake who was flubbed her chance and took the campaign down with her.
She’ll go back to Alaska. I think it’s up for grabs how she’ll fare. Right now she has the full, fierce national party apparatus behind her in Troopergate, etc. That could be quietly withdrawn after the election is lost. (And I think chances are it may well be.) The very base she’s attracted–the wingnut faction–may prove to be a liability in the long run.
I think Obama has run a solid race but it wouldn’t be nearly this close if the economy hadn’t tanked. All along there’s been a pitched battle for the uncommitted, with Rovean scorched-earth tactics as a viable tool in the arsenal. Palin energized a faction, just as planned, but it wasn’t the large, ambivalent middle. I think overall she scared or alienated too many of them. She turned out to be the anti-Reagan. That cost, and I think the national GOP will want shed of her, right back to as much obscurity as possible.
She’s very ambitious, though, and has gotten a wild taste of fame. She might go the Fox ‘news’ route but I think more likely she’ll seize on her new rabid fans among the fringe. She makes a great demagogue and she ain’t gonna go quietly, no matter where it is. The GOP rather created a monster.
I may be offbase here, but look what the GOP powerful did to Kathleen Harris. The woman had the brassiest of balls in 2000, but after she was of use to them, they did not support her. (I may be wrong on details–IMS, she was relegated to the relative obscurity from which she came, no?)
Palin jumped the queue and did not prove herself worthy of the favored status. She’ll disappear from the national political scene fairly quickly, but I can see her with her own cable show or a Fox pundit spot–it’s a natural for her. Unless she incites a riot at one of her next rallies…
Sarah Palin is no Dan Quayle or Walter Mondale. Quayle and Mondale were terrible politicians. Neither of them could give a speech worth a damn. Mondale could make you fall asleep just by looking at you. Quayle could make you feel dumber just by listening to him.
A better analogy with Palin would be Ronald Reagan, ca 1964. That year, Republicans lost the White House. Their only bright spot was the ‘lightweight’ TV actor who showed up on the scene and gave a speech that is still talked about to this day. He electrified the party. Then the Republicans lost, and Reagan went away, but we all know how that ended.
Bill Clinton’s opinion on politics is usually pretty astute. He has said that she’s one of the most naturally gifted politicians he’s ever seen. And she is. Policy aside, knowledge aside, and judged on pure political skills, she’s a powerhouse. She came out of nowhere and with a few days of preparation delivered a speech better than any politician in Washington, save perhaps Barack Obama, coudl hope to deliver. Like Reagan’s, people will be talking about that speech for decades to come.
With a sagging McCain floundering in the polls, Palin is still playing to capacity crowds wherever she goes. Ten, fifteen thousand people. And they come away liking her even more. She knows how to command attention, how to work a crowd, and how to energize the people who listen to her. Palin brought more people to the Vice Presidential debate than any other in history, and more people tuned in to hear her than they did for Barack Obama, and more than any presidential candidate in almost two decades. Dan Quayle or Walter Mondale couldn’t dream of that kind of star power.
Clearly, she needs more time to up to speed on national issues and world affairs. She was probably plucked from Alaska too soon, or at least pushed into the wrong job out of the gate. But she’s not stupid - everyone near her says she’s a very quick study. But she’s unseasoned for sure.
There are a couple of paths Palin could go down. An obvious one if the Republicans are routed in this election would be the Howard Dean Path - become the leader of the Republican party. Her job would be to excite Republicans, raise funds, and help set the direction of the party. I honestly see that as a strong possibility. This would also keep her in the public eye and doing the rounds of the cable shows and such, and allow her to learn how Washington works and give her access to the people she needs to learn from. That would groom her for a run at the Presidency in 2012 or 2016.
Another path for her would be pundit route, like Laura Ingraham or Monica Crowley.
Still another would be to stay Governor for another election cycle, then wind up in the cabinet of another Republican president, should Republicans win the White House again in 4 or 8 years.
In either case, she’s far too politically gifted to just vanish into the woodwork again. If McCain loses, she’ll be remembered as the only bright spot for Republicans in 2008. She’s young, and has at least 20-30 years of political life left.
There is absolutely nothing in common between Kathleen Harris and Sarah Palin. Harris was a low-level functionary with poor political skills who happened to be in the right place to get 15 minutes of fame, and tried to use it to catapult herself to the national stage. But she had no charisma and no political sense at all.
Harris was never the darling of Republicans. Her run for higher office was greeted with skepticism and she faded away as fast as she showed up, while making a very tiny splash.
Sarah Palin isn’t just a star in the Republican Party - she’s a superstar. Go read some right-wing blogs or web sites. Go read some accounts of the various rallies she is speaking at. After this election, in which it is likely that that McCain will lose in a landslide and Republicans will be routed in the House and Senate, Palin may well emerge as the only Republican on the national stage that anyone wants to be associated with. They’ll be begging her to save the party. She’s not getting blamed for McCain’s failure - in fact, they’re already blaming McCain for mishandling Palin. There are ‘Set Sarah Free!’ campaigns within the Republican party, begging McCain to put her front and center and let her run the show and use her own instincts without interference from McCain’s people.
I forgot one other path Palin could go down - she could become Newt Gingrich without the negative baggage - that is, she could become an inside player, starting up a Republican revival coalition, writing op-ed pieces, giving speeches, and even crossing the aisle and working with people like the Clintons (if you’ll note, both Clintons have refused to say a single negative word about her. Very smart, they are. And she has refused to say a negative word about either of them. This is a re-aligning election that threatens to leave the Clintons on the outside of the new power ciccles).
I will. Reagan won almost every state, twice. Here are the states Obama simply cannot win in my opinion, barring something crazy, like McCain endorsing him: Oklahoma, Kansas, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, most of Nebraska. Mind you, there are several states besides those that he almost certainly won’t win, like South Carolina and the Dakotas, but it is at least theoretically possible that he could appeal to enough Republicans to get a razor-thin margin of victory. There’s no chance he loses only one state.
I think Palin will be the Republican nominee for President in 2012.
I hope not. She is a divider, not a uniter. She appeals to a narrow constituency - will she abandon that constituency for larger popularity? I wonder. She strikes me as a wingnut who found herself catapaulted into prominence by a stupid decision on the part of a desperate man. She’s a “natural politician” because she’s preaching to her choir - she alienates everyone else.
I think there might well be a better Republican candidate by 2012, but that President Obama will be pretty secure for his second term.
Thing is I do not think that Palin is quite as dumb as she now appears. She is of a very different POV than mine, and she has not had any curiousity about issues outside of Alaska, and she was in put in a circumstance of having to cram not only on these issues but on the ticket’s stands on these issues. Memorizing the talking points was a big enough task; understanding them on that kind of short notice another.
But with a few years to prepare and not having to worry about being consistent with McCain’s positions, she could be a nucleus around which the dissolved remnants of the GOP recrystalize - rebuilding from the RR base.
If I were buying stock, I’d favor Enron.
Bill Clinton was one of those who described her as a naturally gifted politician, and he’s hardly part of her choir.
How dare you insult Ronald Reagan like that. Reagan did not just give a speech and go away. Reagan paid his dues campaigning. In fact, before that, he had been the spokesman for a major company, and had been all over the country learning and meeting people. He was also president of SAG in a politically charged time, and SAG politics sometimes makes national politics look like a fourth grade election.
Reagan had carefully thought out opinions. Palin gave a speech written for someone else. Now I do admit that she is talented in speaking well from teleprompters about stuff she knows nothing about - she was a weather person, after all, and I suspect her meteorological talents are somewhat lacking.
She clearly can’t do anything except string together talking points, badly, these days, and wink.
Sure she draws a crowd. She’s a gasp celebrity. Remember when that was a dirty word? How many people not in the base is she getting for McCain? How many independents has she driven away by being a joke of a VP candidate? And how come she and McCain appear together so often? That’s a waste of resources.
Look at the poll I cited. Half the Republicans think she is unfit. She’s certainly a big help. If McCain’s people thought she was such hot stuff, she’d be allowed to talk to reporters - but we know how that worked out.
So… You think being a spokesman for GE and being the head of SAG is better experience than being Governor of a state and a mayor and a high official of the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission?
Reagan was certainly a lot smarter, and lot more thoughtful than his critics ever gave him credit for, until the day he died. I’ve been trying to tell people how knowledgeable Reagan was, and how important ideas were to him, for years. And of course he didn’t ‘go away’ permanently. He became Governor of California four years later. Obviously he didn’t vanish. I meant that after Goldwater was beaten in a rout, the party was dispirited and everyone faded away for a little while. Reagan was a fairly small player in Republican politics until he gave that speech, and afterwards he became the new voice of the party. Nonetheless, it took him two attempts and 16 years after that to make it to the Presidency.
Nonsense. There’s far more to political skill than stringing together talking points and winking. Palin has political skill in the same league as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. She’s much better than Hillary, McCain, or Biden. I’m not talking about foreign policy knowledge or wonkish knowledge of Washington. I’m talking about the ability to inspire people, the ability to work a crowd, to know what tone to use and when, to know when to deliver something forcefully and when to deliver it humorously or sadly. Knowing what to kiss, and when. A lot of these skills are intangible. It like the difference between a good ‘B’ actor and a movie star. You can’t put your finger on exactly what makes a star a star, but you know it when you see it.
We all knew Obama was something special when he gave his big coming out speech at the Democratic convention four years ago. And he was just reading from a teleprompter, and no one knew whether he wrote that speech or not. But he delivered it. Great orators can read the phone book and captivate you. Horrible speakers like Bush can take great words and mangle them into incomprehensibility, simply by not knowing when to pause and how to find the rhythm of the words.
These skills are not easy to find. There’s no one else currently in the Republican party I can think of who has them. Certainly not to the degree Palin does.
Now, it may be that her political talent is writing cheques that her brain and knowledge base can’t cash. Maybe that will be her Achilles heel forever. Or maybe she can learn a lot and put the substance behind the flash. But there’s no question she’s got the flash. And that’s a rare commodity. Republicans won’t give up on her easily.
Katherine Harris, like Barack Obama, has a graduate degree from Harvard. She’s a right wing religious nutjob jjust like Palin, but she’s not STUPID like Palin. Their political skills are about the same. Neither is in Obama’s universe in terms of either skill or substance.
Palin basically has the skills of a local television news anchor. She can read mechanically from a teleprompter with a fake grin on her face. The rest is hype. We’ve seen that she has zero depth of intellect, knowledge or substance and the majority of Americans find her not only unintelligent and unqualified, but morally repulsive as well. She sure as hell can’t WRITE a speech, and comparing any aspect of her political facility outside an ability to read a teleprompter (something my 9 year-old could do), comparing her to Clinton or Obama is the most laughable delusion. Just imagine her trying to debate Bill Clinton, or even Hillary Clinton. She’s not in that league. Hell, she’s not even in John McCain’s league. She’s a ham and egger off the street who Nascar fans like because they want to fuck her. That’s all she is. She’s nothing more. In order to be a viable national candidate, she has to appeal to somebody besides people who watch the 700 Club.