These are moment conservatives and people elect them. They screw everything up, but after all too brief intervals, people will vote for them again.

Never underestimate the power of ignorance when it comes to elections. If you think Sarah Palin is bad, it is only because you don’t know much about the career of Strom Thurman.

She CANNOT keep her stupid extreme GOP talking points out of any conversation for 5 minutes!

Case in point:
Late Edition: Sarah Palin Is So Excited To Work With That Terrorist Lover!
I don’t give a rats WHAT her supposed IQ is! She’s a moron. 🙂

IMNSHO! LOL

We should have a couple of years of silence while the GOP licks its wounds and decides what it’s going to do. If they really want to be a national party again they are going to have to break the lock the evangelicals have on their local organizations. You can’t win on the social issues alone anymore.

The media “Gore-ed” Sarah Palin, and that is coming out. The US media is almost uniformly misogynous and both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin have suffered from this.

Palin was a Republican “excuse”, not a “reason”. She outdrew McCain at campaign events, and now some of the lies/misinformation that were used to attack her are falling before reality.

When Richard Nixon lost to John Kennedy, the media said he would never run again. When Ronald Reagan lost his first bid for the Republican nomination, the media said he was out of it.

If Palin can swing the media, which is what all of these press events is really about, and she runs for the Senate, instead of re-election to governor, she will be the front runner for the Republican 2012 nomination.

The Republican Party loyalists select the candidates, not the public at large. Palin appeals to the Republican core as John McCain never did.

The whole “troopergate” investigation by the Alaskan legislature was a smear job, and was never intended to be anything else. The purpose was an attempt by the old line Republican politicians to weaken the Palin supporters who were running for office all over the state. The Alaska legislature only meets for 90 days, and this was conducted entirely during the recess. The report was originally timed for after the election to ensure it would be going on during the entire election cycle. There would be a new Alaska legislature after the election, so the entire process would have to be started from day one for the report to have any real validity and to go to the next stage which would be the equivalent of an indictment. A hit job, plain and simple, but that was never reported or explained.

It is up to Sarah Palin whether she decides to run for President, and up to the Republican Party “faithful” whether she is the candidate. There are 4 years to go, and there will be no real indications of intent for the first two years. I have enough to worry about with the obsessive secrecy of the current Democrat, which shadows the obsession of the current Republican.

The fact that the Democratic choice is a graduate of an exclusive prep school, who went to an Ivy League university, and on to a Harvard graduate school, just like the current President, does not fill me with joy. I look for patterns, and these patterns don’t inspire confidence in me.

Ordinarily, it’s pretty simple for reporters to judge a politician’s popularity. You look at the percentage of people who tell pollsters they have a “favorable” impression; you look at whether that number is rising or falling over time; and you look at whether the “favorable” number exceeds the “unfavorable” number.

But, seduced by big crowds, some pundits ignored the national surveys and waxed rhapsodic about Palin’s “middle-class magnetism.” They forgot that rallies are not representative of the general public. Barry Goldwater, George McGovern and Walter Mondale attracted passionately cheering throngs — and none of them cracked 42 percent of the vote.

According to CBS News polling, Palin never earned a majority favorable rating. From the Republican convention to Election Day — as more people got to know her — Palin’s favorable number dropped seven points, her unfavorable rating almost doubled, and her positive number finished no higher than her negative number. (By contrast, Barack Obama’s favorable rating surpassed his unfavorable rating by 15 points; Joe Biden’s positive-to-negative gap exceeded 20 points.)

By the end of the campaign, about one in seven Obama supporters had once backed John McCain. The biggest reason these mostly middle-class voters switched sides? The presence of Mrs. Middle-Class Magnetism on the Republican ticket.

Another way to judge Palin is by McCain’s own standards. He picked her to do two things: rally the Republican base, and attract key swing voters, including women, independents, suburbanites, and younger parents. By every conceivable measure, Palin failed.

Core Republican turnout declined 1.3 percent compared to four years ago, the Republican share of the electorate dropped five points from 2004 — and the depression of conservative voters was amplified in key states such as Ohio, where Obama won despite earning almost the same number of votes as John F. Kerry. The difference is that 300,000 people who showed up for Bush/Cheney decided to stay home for McCain/Palin.

The list goes on. Palin didn’t help among women — they went for Obama by 13 points. She didn’t help among independents — they went for Obama by 8 points. She didn’t help among suburbanites — they went for Obama by 2 points. She didn’t help among people with children under 18 — they went for Obama by 8 points. Among all these groups, the 2008 Republican ticket performed worse than any successful nominees in their party’s history.

As Palin prepares to speak to her fellow GOP governors — and to restart her political career — some Palin allies have taken to dismissing her entire performance as a national candidate. “None of it matters,” one told me. “This was McCain’s campaign, and Sarah didn’t have much to do with the outcome.” But according to an NBC News poll, Palin weighed down McCain’s candidacy more than President Bush, and more than the war in Iraq. How could that big an anchor not create a little ripple?

The rule is that nobody votes for vice president — but this may have been the year nobody voted for Sarah Palin.

Palin has reached her sell-by date

Ya know… McCain may well be a *has-been*, but Palin is a *never-was*! And she never will be! 🙂

IMNSHO! 😉 LOL

If she runs for the Senate in two years, then she will be on track to make another run at the White House. If she runs for governor, then she isn’t interested.

The major obstacle in the next two years is how Alaska makes out in the recession. That depends on what happens to the price of oil which is a definite unknown. In the current credit crisis I can’t see a funding source for the natural gas pipeline, which would be a major boost to the state. State bonds suck at the moment, and it will take a while for the bond market to improve.