Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The Palin Qualifications

Doctor Zero writes on Hot Air

Writing on his website, which used to be called “New Majority” until he got tired of people laughing at him, David Frum published an essay called “The Palin Fantasy” over the weekend. Even as the House of Representatives was preparing to pass the most blatantly unconstitutional assault on America’s freedom in Congressional history, Frum found something really outrageous to write about: Matthew Continetti’s admiring essay on Sarah Palin’s populist appeal. It’s a good thing Frum has his priorities in order. We wouldn’t want Palin to get into office and drop a few trillion dollars of unsustainable debt on us.

Frum disputes Palin’s populist appeal by citing some poll numbers:

According to Gallup, 63% of Americans say they would never consider voting for her. By a margin of 62%-31% Americans rate Palin “unqualified” to serve as president – by far the worst score for any leading Republican.

In comparison, only 51% of Americans say they would never consider voting for Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee – and a plurality of Americans rate the two as “qualified”: 50-36 say Huckabee is qualified, 49-39 say Romney is qualified.

This is an important point, because poll numbers never change, especially for private citizens who haven’t declared any intention to run for office, three years before the elections. How often to polls have to shift, or produce completely inaccurate numbers, before people stop trying to use them to shape the reality they supposedly measure? A nation looking for confident, visionary leadership is not going to look down and notice David Frum waving a spreadsheet of poll numbers.

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Comparing Palin’s “qualification” ratings to Romney or Huckabee is a little silly, because neither of them took the kind of pounding she did. The Left’s supply of anti-Mormon bigotry remains locked in the toxic waste dump of its soul, where it will remain until Romney looks like he’s going to win the Republican nomination. Huckabee seems to be carefully laying the groundwork for a 2012 run, but right now he could interview live extraterrestrials on his Fox show without pulling a fraction of the sustained media attention Palin continues to receive. Much of this attention is negative, but any principled Republican who thinks he would draw positive media coverage is fantasizing more than the most ardent Palin supporter.

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Palin has developed a remarkable knack for saying all the things President Obama should be saying, at any given moment. While Obama was serving as the warm-up act for anti-American and anti-Semitic nutjobs at the United Nations, Palin spoke of her country’s proud tradition of liberty and capitalism in Hong Kong. While Obama pondered whether the ruins of the Berlin Wall would make a suitable backdrop for his magnificence, Palin wrote of the twilight struggle between Ronald Reagan’s America and the Evil Empire… and wasn’t shy about naming both the heroes and villains.

Palin’s qualifications are not merely academic. She’s been a lonely pair of boots on the ground, in conflicts where most of her presumptive rivals have been content to either sit on the sidelines or follow her lead. She’s demonstrated a willingness to take risks, and stand her ground under fire. Those are qualities Republican voters will be looking for, if they want a President who can do more than just negotiate lower monthly payments on the lethally overdrawn American Distress card.

Read the whole thing here



Rob Harrison on Conservatives4Palin has a great follow up article
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As for Gov. Palin? To be sure, one cannot simply do a straight-line comparison, since she’s currently leading from the sidelines, and while she faced some significant leadership challenges during her time in Juneau, they were different from those faced by the inhabitant of the White House. That said, she has consistently risen to the challenges she has faced—even when that challenge meant accepting that she was no longer the best person to fulfill the duties she had been given, and the act leadership demanded of her was abdication. As Doctor Zero has noted, she has been consistently saying the things that need to be said in this moment that our national administration has not been saying; and she had the courage to stand up for her principles in the race in upstate New York, when to that point the only conservative leaders who had done so were those with nothing to lose.

Beyond that, though, look at how Sarah Louise Heath Palin has lived her life. She has consistently identified things that need to be done and found ways to get them done. She did it on the basketball court in high school—it wasn’t her talent that got her the nickname “Sarah Barracuda,” after all. She was never the most talented player on the hardwood, but she understood how to lead a team, and how to drive it to victory, and she did just that. She did it with her beauty-pageant participation, using that as a way to help pay for college. She did it in raising a large family and running a family business.

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Read the whole thing here it's great

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