Sarah Go Bye-Bye Now

Sarah Palin continued her farewell tour of the America she hates so much today by talking with the Liberal Media Elitist, Matt Lauer, in the Today Show. Of course, she did it from her home in Alaska, but the very fact that she allowed a member of the mainstream media into her private Caribou Barbie Dream House shows how far she has fallen.

Many polls show that a majority of Republicans want Sarah Palin to run for president in 2012. Of course, many of these people can’t even count to 12, let alone 20. These are the same people that voted for McCain. Actually, these are two thirds of the people who voted for McCain. McCain lost. Getting two thirds of the number of votes McCain got is not a viable electoral strategy, even if you use “fuzzy math”.

Some rueful republicans believe that Palin is like a rose plucked before it was time to bloom. This is the sort of creepy imagery that has haunted Palin’s nomination since that first moment when Bill Kristol met her on a Weekly Standard cruise to Alaska and suddenly thought he was on The Love Boat. These people thought she was an “attractive” candidate, who could, with a little coaching, charm the pants off the electorate. But, the electorate sobered up and realized they had a wife to go home to in the nick of time, leaving Palin to sob into her cosmo in the DoubleTree lobby bar that is the wreck of the republican party.

I do not see a path to her winning the republican nomination in either 2012 or 2016.

I have more ruminations on the future of the GOP that I will leave for another post (lucky you). However, I do think that in the near term the party will lurch further right and in the longer term it will come back to the center. My bet is that Obama and the democrats will avoid the risk of overplaying their hand in the next few years, putting them in a strong position in 2012. Like the democrats in 2004, the strongest contenders will keep their powder dry for the next election. Accepting that premise for a moment, the republicans will be in the market for a sacrificial lamb and there could be a window of opportunity for Palin to run for President.

Here’s why I don’t think it will happen:

Palin made a horrible first impression on most Americans. The base loves her, but the base is, was and always will be, from now until forever and ever amen: too fucking small. To win the white house, you need the support of independents. These people hate Sarah Palin like Sarah Palin hates saying the “g” at the end of words. They regard her as a know-nothing and an extremist, christianist, whackjob and she is all of these things.

Some say that she can redress at least the first part of the problem by “studying hard”. By this, they don’t mean actual book learnin’ and all night swat sessions, they mean picking one or two issues on which she might be credible e.g. energy policy and becoming a national leader on the issue.

But from what platform? Governor of Alaska? She’s going to find out really fast that the state of Alaska was getting attention because she was the VP pick, rather than the VP pick getting attention because she is from Alaska. Nobody gives a shit about Alaska. All of that guff about Alaska being a critical energy-producing state was bogus; Alaska produces a small minority of the oil America consumes and even less of our total energy load. You can be sure Obama is not going to allow drilling in ANWR, so the opinions of governor Drill-Baby wont be of much interest to anybody.

In addition, she will have to deal with the consequences of her re-negotiated deal with the oil companies, which was a boon when oil prices were going up but has downside risk when they come down. Guess what, they’re coming down. Also, she has to live without the pork barrel earmarks she so loved as Mayor of Wasila and Governor of Nowhere but so despised as Vice President of Nothing. And she has to go back and finish negotiations on that big oil pipeline with the big oil companies she spent weeks bashing on the campaign trail. And she has to do all this with zero support in the congress and the senate. Being governor of Alaska is a much tougher job now than it was when she left Juneau two months ago.

She could, of course, try to appoint herself to Ted Steven’s senate seat. It’s unclear to me (due to my total lack of research into the subject) whether she can actually appoint herself senator or whether she’d have to run in a special election. But let’s say she makes it to the senate. She just doesn’t wear vary well on extended exposure. She could go the Hillary route and try to curry favor with other senators, learn the ropes, master policy detail, perhaps champion the energy independence cause along with some religious right priorities like abortion rights and stem-cell research. But there won’t be many opportunities for her to do any mavericky reforming in the minority party.

And if she wants to run in 2012, she won’t have much time to accomplish anything. She’d be in the senate for two years before she started the campaign for 2012, just like Obama this time around. She would be revealed as the arch political opportunist that she is.

Of course, she could wait until 2016 and really earn her bones as a senator (per Hillary’s path). But by 2016 her expiration date will have come and gone and the republican party will, I predict, be drifting away from the extreme right. Also, the pack will be a lot stronger in 2016.

There’s one other scenario: she runs out her term as governor, then becomes a kind of political celebrity, cashing-in with a book and maybe a TV talk show (like Mike Huckabee) and traveling the country building a base of support for a run.

Her choices, if she wants to run are: run in 2012 against President Obama with the taste of her stupid still in everybody’s mouth or wait until 2016 and get crushed by a stronger field and a reformed or reforming party? Why not just cash-in on her fifteen minutes and become the white, right-wing Oprah? Or Bill O’Reilly with lipstick?

I think that Sarah Palin is full of ambition, perhaps to the exclusion of everything else. But I am not convinced that it is purely political power that she cares about. Perhaps she sees politics as a means to an end, with the end being her as popular, perhaps wealthy, and with a voice that everybody has to pay attention to. If she could get that without the hassle of running for office, I think she’d be tempted. We might note, for comparison, that Geraldine Ferraro got a big book contract after her loss in 1984 and never did take-on her VP opponent when the chance came in 1988.

There’s one final thing that she may be debating in her own mind right now… On the one hand, she got a lot of attention and there are plenty of people who are encouraging her to run again. It must be tempting to pursue the chance to be the first female president. But on the other hand, there are all those scandals, lies and skeletons in the closet - Troopergate, Triggate, Travelgate, Librarygate, Closetgate, Nepotismgate, Bridgegate… Who knows if all of them are true, but some of them definitely are. If the media doesn’t get to the bottom of them in the next few weeks, it’s a sign that her star is fading and perhaps her fifteen minutes are over. Regardless, she’d never survive the barrage of criticism and parody that would be entailed in a lengthy primary.

If she goes back to being governor, she can write a book (or have one ghost written) now and bank that cash, then move over to TV in 2010, claiming that politics is too tough on her family and seeking an “alternate way to speak directly to the nation on these issues that matter so much”.

What will she do? I don’t know, but I’m thinking this… Sarah Palin: Whacko, Diva, Hillbilly, Know-Nothing, Mudslinger, Fuckwit. Pragmatist.

Buh-bye.