Bob Schieffer's Other Predictions

By Nicole Coulter

This morning on The CBS Early Show, Bob Schieffer graciously offered his conclusion that Sarah Palin does not have a future in politics. Despite the epoch book tour and more interest in her than the entire Republican party, he deemed her merely a momentary "amusement." Fortunately, through the wonders of the internet we were able to track down a few of Mr. Schieffer's other predictions over his 130-year career in journalism and see how they've turned out. By the looks of it, Palin's got quite the future!

Talking about Michael Jordan in June of 1990:

SCHIEFFER: I think Michael Jordan is going to sell a lot of Gatorade and shoes. I think he’ll be a great attraction, you know, as an amusement....But I can’t imagine that he has much future as an NBA champion. I really don’t. He can score a lot of points, but he's just not in the same league as Larry Bird or Isiah Thomas. He's whining now about the Bad Boys who applied those Jordan Rules on him and his own coaches. I don’t think it’s going to work.... It’s kind of like a baseball player blaming the other team or the bat boy or something. After losing in the playoffs for 8 straight years, my guess is Jordan is not ever going to win an NBA championship. I don’t think he'll get that far.”

On Ronald Reagan's future in 1976:

SCHIEFFER: I think Ronald Reagan is going to sell a lot of hair gel and magazine subscriptions. I think he’ll be a great attraction, you know, as an amusement....But I can’t imagine that he has much future in politics. I really don’t. He can give a good speech, but he's just not in the same league as Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford. He's whining now about the evils of communism and the wimps in his own party. I don’t think it’s going to work.... It’s kind of like a baseball player blaming the other team or the bat boy or something. After losing in the primary to Gerald Ford, my guess is Reagan is not ever going to become president. I don’t think he'll get that far.”

On the rise of the Beatles in 1964:

SCHIEFFER: I think the Beatles are going to sell a lot of albums. I think they’ll be a great attraction, you know, as an amusement....But I can’t imagine that they have much future as recording artists. I really don’t. They can put on a good show, but they're just not in the same league as The Beach Boys and The Everly Brothers. My guess is the Beatles will be a big deal for short time, but I don’t think we'll be talking about them in three years.”

On the invention of the light bulb in 1879:

SCHIEFFER: I think Thomas Edison is going to sell a lot of light bulbs. I think they’ll be a great attraction, you know, as an amusement....But I can’t imagine that incandescent lighting has much of a future as an actual household commodity. I really don’t. Sure these little bulbs light up a room, but they're just not in the same league as oil lamps. I don’t think they'll get us that far.”

Amazing predictions, Bob. Keep up the great work!

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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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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

[...]

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.

[...]

Read the whole thing here it's great

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Sarah Palin and the Dysfunctional Political Class

From James V. DeLong, on Pajamas Media Via Doug Brady at C4P

The frenetic hostility to Sarah Palin, even by many on the Republican side, is unnerving, because her qualifications to be president are objectively better than those of almost anyone who has been on the national ticket over the past decade.

A reasonable conclusion is that these qualifications are precisely the cause of the hostility. To admit to the reality that the dominant political class, including the MSM and the punditocracy of both parties, has been giving us abysmal presidential candidates, to accept that a hockey mom plucked from small-town Alaska is better than the best that the political class can come up with, would require recognition of the terrible truth that the system has become deeply dysfunctional. Doing this would force our political elites to look into an abyss of serious questions about the functioning of our democracy. Palin creates a cognitive dissonance so intense that it simply cannot be accepted.

To start, compare her experience as a person, mayor, and state leader with George W. Bush’s pre-presidential career as an alcoholic, baseball executive, and ornamental governor. Whatever one thinks of his performance as president — and like most conservatives my views are complex — he was not promising material as of 2000.

Al Gore would be disqualified by knowledge of his academic career and by a reading of Earth in the Balance, an exercise in messianic ignorance. His subsequent career getting rich from climate change subsidies would reinforce this opinion. John Kerry had a Senate career of unbroken mediocrity, compounded by his unapologized-for Winter Soldier exercise and the still-unanswered Swift Boat questions.

John Edwards had no shadow of a qualification, and again the judgment is confirmed by subsequent events.

Obama’s qualifications were will-o-the-wisp. His supporters cited his “potential,” as they had to, because his only actual feat was his first book — and the claims that this was ghosted have been met by non-denial. The Asia Times characterizes these rumors as “well-established,” which tells one something about current foreign assessments of Obama. The president’s long-standing ties to the radical left should have tipped the balance to the negative.

Vice President Joe Biden has a long history of blurring the line between fantasy and reality to a degree that one wonders if he sees any distinction, but 36 years of this is enough to make him “qualified.” This, too, tells a lot about the mental processes of the dominant political class.

One can deeply respect John McCain’s courage and service. But he is an erratic senator, with a tendency to reach decisions on a whim and then excoriate anyone who disagrees. As demonstrated by McCain-Feingold — which hamstrings the middle-class base of the Republicans while leaving intact the power of unions and public employees, the media, the rich, and Native American tribes — McCain does not, or cannot, think even two moves ahead.

This leaves Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney as the only candidates with any weight, and Palin’s executive experience gives her an edge over Lieberman.

Read the whole thing here

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