I talked about this already last week, but I wasn't really focused on Palin specifically and since Ross Douthat is keeping the discussion alive with what I think is a pretty good post, I figured I have an excuse to go back and revisit this one more time.
There are two points to make about Palin vs. Santorum, or Perry, or Pawlenty, or for that matter Romney.
The first one is that unlike Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Huntsman, Paul, Johnson, and probably Santorum, Sarah Palin was a plausible nominee: she had conventional credentials (just by being the most recent VP nominee), and she had positions on public policy which were firmly within the mainstream of her party.
The second is, as Douthat says, "nothing in her post-2008 career suggests an aptitude or appetite for the kind of work required to build a smooth-running (or even occasionally-misfiring) national campaign." Except it's actually worse than that. "Post-2008" isn't enough; nothing in her career after John McCain unveiled her as his running mate suggests she was likely to do the things that one needs to do to win a major party nomination.
Of course, the other perspective is that she sure did do a lot of things in 2009, 2010, and 2011 that looked a lot like running for president. Perhaps she did, and she just quit, either because she didn't enjoy doing it or because she realized she was losing (in other words, the same reasons that Pawlenty got out). It's hard to tell without more evidence; the things that sort of looked like a Sarah Palin version of running for president also look a lot like keeping one's name in the news in order to better cash in.
One more thing: would Mitt Romney really have found it hard to attack her? Maybe. But in addition to attacking his GOP opponents always from the right (as Ed Kilgore noted; sorry, just a memory, no link), Romney excelled at letting the other candidates destroy themselves. And that's something the Sage of Wasilla could be counted on to do.
Put it all together, and what you have with Sarah Palin was a plausible nominee, but also someone who did not seem likely to be a very strong candidate, and was in fact a very weak candidate during the months when she appeared to be sort-of running.
Monday, April 16, 2012
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I tend to agree that Palin would have been a plausible nominee, though certainly not a good one. I disagree about her strength, however. I think the very things that many see as her weaknesses are in fact her strengths. She has a deep disdain for 'traditional' politics, a strong dislike for the Republican 'establishment', whatever that happens to be, and a belief that all the nonsense the media care about is rather unimportant. Those things play very well to a core part of the Republican base, probably the Santorum and Gingrich crowds. She might have been the one candidate who could have united those two groups and accomplished what Santorum and Gingrich (and Perry, Cain, and Bachmann) failed to do. All that is to say Sarah Palin would have been a dangerous candidate more than anything else.
ReplyDeleteI think it's easy to confuse the fact that she had strengths the other candidates lacked with the idea that she actually would have been a stronger candidate. There's no doubt that she was and is a master of media trolling and building a myth of herself as a nontraditional warrior against the establishment, and in that particular area she's more effective than Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum, and Romney. But that one strength is outweighed by her lack of discipline, and in that arena she's at least as bad as those others, and definitely worse than Santorum and Romney.
DeleteKylopod,
DeleteAgreed on that point!
Everything Kylopod says makes sense, but still I wonder...
DeleteDoes Palin have enough self-discipline to go the distance to a nomination?
The unquantifiable freakout meltdown factor.
You can get a major party nominee as whacked as Palin (Nixon), but the comparison makes the point.
you mean, "...counted on NOT to do." Right?
ReplyDeleteI agree with what JB wrote. Palin could be counted on to provide her own fuel for her self-destruction.
DeleteYup. I mistype stuff like that all the time, but I said what I meant this time.
Deleteyou mean, "...counted on NOT to do." Right?
ReplyDeleteI'd say a plausible nominee is someone who can effectively contest the general election, and Palin wouldn't have satisfied that criterion at all. Her approval ratings among independents were absolutely horrible to begin with, and a frenzied primary fight in which she would've presumably tacked even further to the right wouldn't have improved them. Looking at how Gingrich, Santorum et al. were swiftly exposed as unelectable right-wingers when the spotlight fell on them, it's hard to see how she would've done any better. Not that it matters that much anyway, since she clearly didn't want to be a politician any more and just kept toying with the idea to extend her 15 minutes of fame. Note how she's completely dropped off the radar since admitting that she won't run.
ReplyDelete