Does anyone else feel that Sarah Palin is a symbol of the final self-destruction of the Republican Party? If you watched her “resignation” speech the other day, you have to wonder what the Republicans are thinking. She began her speech by recounting the successful efforts of her tenure as governor. They all had to do with new drilling and new natural gas pipelines, actually all valuable things, but really simply things that were developed by private companies and she and the legislature agreed to after taking a cut for the state.
Nothing wrong with that. Alaskans may be the only residents of a state in this country who actually get money from the state rather than pay state income taxes. It has been that way for some time because of the natural resources that are tapped by big corporations. After they tap the resources, the state taps them for a piece of the action. And they do seem to have a pretty good sense of conservation in Alaska, ANWAR notwithstanding.
You heard the presentation…and there was much, much more…rambling all over the place. Look, Sarah Palin may be adequate as governor of Alaska. She was born and raised there and served as a mayor of a small town there. I think that one of the four or five colleges she apparently attended may have been in Alaska. But she isn’t a sophisticated internationalist. You can see again from this resignation speech, she has a limited vocabulary, lacks an analytical mind, has a disorganized presentation of ideas and seems, on top of all that, to be very, very naive. Frankly, the idea that she could be elected the governor of any state is a reach.
On the other hand, she seems to be a very nice person, an attractive woman, a sincerely devoted mother, a good wife, a great public servant, a person concerned for her neighbors and friends. She is not anyone you would expect to conduct high level talks with someone like Kim Jong-il or Ahmadinejad. She would not be able to simply say to Putin or Medvedev, “Hey, I can see Russia from my porch.” That is really not what they want to hear. She doesn’t understand economics enough to know what to do about the economy. She proved that in the election. A nice lady, very nice, who…in this very competitive, extremely complex world of national and international affairs…comes off as a bumpkin. A dolt. A zero.
In the whole resignation speech, she rambled on and on and made very little sense. That should be enough to let the Neocons know that she doesn’t have what it takes to be a politician at the national level. Remember, Alaska has a smaller population than Milwaukee and it is spread out over an area bigger than Texas.
What is her history? She was no scholar. She was apparently a minor high school jock, a basketball player and a cheerleader. She rambled on about dribbling the ball down the court and keeping your head up. But we don’t know what the hell that meant. Jocks don’t always work out in office though they can get elected because of name recognition. If you are searching for a candidate for President, a light bulb doesn’t suddenly go off and you sit up and say…”Go out and find me another Jim Bunning!” Bunning was a great baseball player. But as a Senator he’s a caricature.
Bunning is against things like social security, Schips, and a public option for health care reform. He’s a big military supporter, enthusiastic supporter of the war in Iraq, voted against health care for poor children and voted to cut the pay of family doctors from Medicare. He voted for Medicare Plus which left about two million senior citizens who would normally have had health care, out in the cold. Stuff like that. Tax cuts for millionaires. Oh yeah, Bunning is a stand-up guy. He’s just not standing up for you. Nor, for that matter, is the other Senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell. He taps more lobbyists than anyone.
Presumably, the Right Wingers see Palin as kind of a “Legally Blonde” type. Of course in that motion picture the point was that the heroine was NOT dumb. When tested, she proved to be smart. When Sarah Palin was tested…and this resignation speech was another example…she proved herself incapable of the style and substance she needs in order to be any kind of national-level politician.
All she had to do was to come out…maybe somewhere that the gulls would not drown out half her speech…and with more than about a dozen neighbors on her lawn…and say that she’s done good things…blah, blah…she’s got new challenges, blah, blah and she’s leaving the governorship to give herself some free time without diminishing the work of the state. Period. Goodbye.
She rambled on and on, twice about how she was not, or was, going to do business as usual–that wasn’t clear. She says that she wants to protect Alaska from something but she didn’t specify what that would be. She says that she’s worried that some unspecified person has some apparent scheme to take over Alaska or America…again, vague and, frankly, weird. She spent a lot of time on what she did to improve the state but basically said that now the state would be better off without her because she has seen so many lame ducks just travel around and do nothing. Well, she doesn’t HAVE TO travel around and do nothing. And isn’t this her first term? Is she term limited after one term? If not, why is she a “lame duck?” Or does she think she is a lame duck for other reasons? Or does she not know what the term “lame duck” means?
If Sarah Palin is the future of the Republican Party, then the Republican Party may become the political party of the five solid Southern states. Kind of a colloquial, Southern party for little old ladies at tea parties and meetings of the Junior League. Although, for all we know, most of them may be laughing at her too.