I like Sarah Palin. I don’t think she’s crazy, or stupid. My problem with her is I don’t think she’s a reader. I don’t think she reads books. This disqualifies her for the Presidency, as far as I’m concerned. The President doesn’t have to be an intellectual, but I do think he or she needs to read and have read a lot of books, about history and biography and economics and foreign policy.
Her lack of book larnin’ is not, however, the cause of the hatred and hysteria she inspires among liberals. Being a beautiful, charismatic, capable, conservative, Christian, pro-life woman, is an unforgivable combination of sins. As I understand it, she has had to spend half a million of her own money on legal fees, defending herself against bogus, political ethics charges. She and her family are viciously attacked in the press and on TV on a regular basis. Being governor of Alaska makes it very difficult to travel in the lower 48 and collect big speaker’s fees. So resigning seems like a very rational thing for her to do, mostly for personal reasons, but also for political reasons.
I don’t expect her to pick up the reading habit though, at this stage of the game.
Jerry Pournelle …
The other major news is Sarah Palin’s decision to get the hell out before the politicians destroy her. There’s a lot of speculation about whether she intends to run for President in 2012. I think that the probability of success now that she has resigned as governor is so small as to make it exceedingly unlikely.
She’s broke, she can’t raise money to pay off her legal bills and still be independent of lobbyists, David Leatherman can joke about her daughter getting knocked up at a baseball game, there is no hint that the “ethics investigations” which require expensive legal defense will cease, and as far as I can see she’s just tired of the whole thing. She has the ability to draw crowds and she has a natural instinct for doing the right thing. She’s not an Ivy League graduate. She’s not an intellectual but she’s smart enough to learn about issues. When people do look at her they try to compare her to Ronald Reagan, which is perhaps unfair at this stage of her career. It would make more sense to compare her to Joe Biden. They ran for the same office.
For a number of reasons she became the target of an attack machine that has apparently succeeded in driving her out of public life. She’ll make use of her celebrity status to raise some money, pay some debts, and try to set up her family income to allow some future choices, but I suspect she she will slowly fade out of the national scene. We will be the poorer for it. One might contemplate what happened to her while reflecting on what we mean by democracy. Would Leatherman still be on the air had he cracked jokes about one of Obama’s daughters? Or even about Katie Cooric’s daughter? Or Tina Fey’s daughter?
Andrew Jackson was a militia commander who had little education, and was not part of the colonial elite. He rose through merit and good luck to become the first “democratic” President, the people’s president. He made mistakes. The comparison to Palin is tempting. She would certainly have been as good a senator as many we have in that august body, even if they are better “qualified” in having elitist credentials. And of course most professional politicians are far richer than the Palins.
I am hardly astonished that the mother of a Down’s Syndrome child, with a son in the war zone, a single mother daughter (and there’s a story we don’t need to know), mounting debts, and no sign of relief would call it quits. Fighting the Chicago machine from Juneau is more than she wants to face.
I doubt that democracy has been well served by driving her from public life. I also doubt that this will be the last such incident.
“I don’t think she reads books. This disqualifies her for the Presidency as far as I’m concerned. The President doesn’t have to be an intellectual but I do think he or she needs to read and have read a lot of books about history and biography and economics and foreign policy.” This is the basic problem. She just didn’t appear to have the depth that only reading develops. Most non-readers can’t just wing it. She tried that and failed.
“conservative, Christian, pro-life woman”
Great qualities if one is a conservative, Christian, pro-life voter.
However if one is more open minded about social issues, possibly belongs to some other religion than her branch of Christianity (or even isn’t religious!), or looks at the abortion issue as being an incredibly complicated one with all sorts of factors making it a terrible and terribly private one then maybe, just maybe she might not make the best choice for President.
There just may be some non conservative, Christian, pro-life citizens of the United States of America that might have a few problems with such a person as the most powerful political leader of their country and the world.
Cheers
Jamie