Why Sarah Palin should be the 2016 GOP nominee -- seriously

From the Baltimore Sun:  Why Sarah Palin should be the 2016 GOP nominee -- seriously

The Republican Party has been doing a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing since the presidential election. Half the conservative columnists and bloggers say the GOP lost because it overemphasized social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. The other half says the party didn't emphasize them enough. And everyone denounces Project ORCA, the campaign's attempt to turn out voters via technology.
But I've got a suggestion for cutting short the GOP angst: Sarah Palin for president in 2016.
You think I'm joking? Think again

In 2008, Ms. Palin, running as my party's vice presidential candidate, was widely supposed to have cost John McCain the election. But that wasn't so. A national exit poll conducted by CNN asked voters whether Ms. Palin was a factor in their voting. Of those who said yes, 56 percent voted for McCain versus 43 percent for Barack Obama.
Furthermore, Mitt Romney, the GOP's anointed contender this year, got almost a million fewer votes than Senator McCain did in 2008. (Meanwhile, President Obama, although winning reelection, lost far more voters than the Republicans, with nearly 7 million fewer voters checking his name on their ballots than did in 2008).
Millions of Americans didn't much care for Mr. Obama and his Obamacare spending blowout, but they didn't feel like voting for Mr. Romney either. Some said that Mr. Romney didn't resonate with recession-hit blue-collar folks in swing states because he "looked like the boss who outsourced their jobs," as one blog commenter quipped.
Gabriel Malor, writing for the New York Daily News' blog, pinpointed another reason: By focusing his campaign mostly on serious economic and political issues such as the national debt and tax incentives, Mr. Romney failed to take into account the fact that large segments of the electorate neither know nor care much about serious economic and political issues. What they — a group sometimes euphemistically called "uninformed voters" — do know and care about are the tugs on their emotions, fears, revulsions and heart strings provided by hours and hours of uninterrupted television watching.
The Democrats understood how to reach that constituency. When a barrage of Obama campaign TV ads told them that the GOP wanted to take away their contraceptives or that Bain Capital killed someone's wife, they took notice. When Mr. Obama strolled the hurricane-stricken beaches of New Jersey in his bomber jacket, they were snowed. As Mr. Malor put it, Mr. Obama won on "binders, Big Bird, birth control and blame Bush."
Ms. Palin can more than keep up with the Democrats in appealing to voters' emotions. Hardly anyone could be more blue collar than Ms. Palin, out on the fishing boat with her hunky blue-collar husband, Todd. Ms. Palin is "View"-ready, she's "Ellen"-ready, she's Kelly-and-Michael-ready.
A Palin "war against women"? Hah! Not only is she a woman, she's got a single-mom daughter, Bristol, to help with the swelling single-mom demographic. On social issues, Ms. Palin, unlike Mr. Romney, has been absolutely consistent. And let's remember that most Americans, whatever their view of choice, disapprove of most abortions.
Gay marriage? Ms. Palin opposes it. But she is also a strong advocate of states' rights, and I'm betting she'd be fine with letting states and their voters grapple with the issue on their own. Remember that all of America didn't swing toward approval of gay marriage on Nov. 6. The voters of Maryland and two other reliably blue states did. If she were smart, Ms. Palin would recruit a member of her impressive gay fanboy base — yes, she has one — to help run her campaign. I nominate Kevin DuJan of the widely read gay conservative blog HillBuzz, a Palin stalwart since 2008.
Ms. Palin's son Track is an Iraq war veteran, so she can be proudly patriotic without being labeled another George W. Bush, looking to do aggressive nation-building. She seems aware there is only one nation in need of building right now: America.
Furthermore, looks count in politics, and Ms. Palin at age 48, has it all over her possible competition, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will be 69 by election day 2016 and who let someone talk her into adopting the flowing blond locks of a college student, making her look like Brunnhilde in a small-town Wagner production. Men love Sarah Palin, and she loves men.
She's tough as nails too. After Election 2008, she was supposed to have been through. This year, eight of the 14 GOP candidates Ms. Palin endorsed for Congress won election or reelection, including tea party favorite Ted Cruz for a Senate seat in Texas.
Sure, there is going to be never-ending nastiness from the left, but she's already lived through that once. Katie Couric? A has-been. Tina Fey? Her shtick was already wearing thin in 2008.
There are also the snooty, East Coast Republican intellectual types, such as Peggy Noonan, who look down their noses at a woman who doesn't shop at Neiman Marcus and didn't attend an Ivy League university. But Peggy made a fool of herself calling the election for Mitt Romney on Nov. 5. Who's going to care what she and her ilk have to say next time?
Some Republicans will say Ms. Palin has too much baggage from 2008, and we need to look for a new Sarah Palin. But I don't see what's wrong with the one we've got. Ever since the 1990s, Republicans have been looking for the next Ronald Reagan. Reagan is now revered in bipartisan circles, but during his presidency he was, like Ms. Palin, ridiculed by liberals. They cited "Bedtime for Bonzo" and sneered at his no-name college degree.
Sarah Palin is the new Ronald Reagan: charming and affable and unwilling to back down if she's right. I can't see what's wrong with that.

 

The great Sarah Palin-for-president joke

The media, which a great many folks think is non-partisaned, non-biased, presenting just the facts, clearly is'n't.

There's a rash of stuff trashing Sarah Palin for 2016, apparently because a lot of conservatives have already started touting her as the new candidate. But really, Sarah Palin simply is not presidential material. No one who has a reality show is! OR who seeks to trademark their name, etc.

Los Angels Times, Opinion:  The great Sarah Palin-for-president joke 

Caught “Game Change” on cable the other night.
Read Charlotte Allen’s Op-Ed article, “Hey, GOP, take the Palin cure,” in The Times on Sunday.
And what did I learn? Well, something doesn’t add up. Or, to paraphrase “I Love Lucy”: “Charlotte, you got some ’splainin’ to do.”
In her Op-Ed, Allen serves up equal parts lemonade and venomade in making her case that Sarah Palin should be the Republican presidential candidate in 2016. In Allen’s view, Palin has it all: She has blue-collar appeal, she’s “tough as nails,” and best of all, she’s a woman, which, in Allen’s world, gives her this advantage: “Men love Sarah Palin, and she loves men.”
Yep, just what the GOP needs: a Marilyn Monroe who hunts moose too.
Now, Allen also likes men, but there are some women she’s not too keen about. Take Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom she describes as looking “like Brunnhilde in a small-town Wagner production.” Or even fellow Republican Peggy Noonan, whom Allen lumps in with those “snooty East Coast Republican intellectual types … who look down their noses at a woman who doesn't shop at Neiman Marcus and didn't attend an Ivy League university.”
Anyway, you get the picture. But for good measure, Allen takes this plunge into mythology at the end:

Some Republicans will say Palin has too much baggage from 2008, and we need to look for a new Sarah Palin. But I don't see what's wrong with the one we've got. Ever since the 1990s, Republicans have been looking for the next Ronald Reagan. Reagan is now revered in bipartisan circles, but during his presidency he was, like Palin, ridiculed by liberals. They cited "Bedtime for Bonzo" and sneered at his no-name college degree.

Sarah Palin is the new Ronald Reagan: charming and affable and unwilling to back down if she's right. I can't see what's wrong with that.

Which is just silly, of course. Heck, if you want a Republican with common-man appeal, there’s a real governor in New Jersey right now who fits that bill.
So, how does one square Allen’s image of this Republican Party Joan of Arc with the petulant, ill-informed, diva-like Palin depicted in “Game Change”?  (In an homage to Palin, I didn’t actually read the book; I settled for the shallow experience of watching the movie, though in true Palin style, I didn’t watch the whole thing.)
Many Times letter writers wondered the same thing, with most thinking that perhaps Allen’s piece was satire.
And really, that’s close to the truth. Though what Allen does isn’t satire; it’s more like “set a fire.”
Commentators like Allen are all over the blogs, opinion sections and the TV and radio “news” and talk shows these days.  Their aim is to provoke, to inflame -- to hit the hornet’s nest and see how many angry people come out. It drives Web traffic; it drives ratings; it drives careers (see: Ann Coulter). But it doesn’t really give you any insight into what the people talking or writing actually believe. And it certainly doesn’t  inform.
So does Allen really think Palin is the GOP’s best choice in 2016?  I doubt it.
But a lot of people read her Op-Ed. And a lot of people commented on it. (Yes, you’re right, including me!)
And that’s the point. Because for Charlotte Allen, the best thing about Sarah Palin is that she’s good for Charlotte Allen.

Sarah Palin And The Greatest Turkey-Related Disaster In The History Of Politics

From HuffPost:  Sarah Palin And The Greatest Turkey-Related Disaster In The History Of Politics

For one day each year, the turkey gets its time to shine. While most of that shining is done quite literally, as the glazed centerpiece of Thanksgiving feasts around the nation, a few fortunate fowl are granted pardons and given a chance to live out their not-so-long lives in greener pastures, awkwardly bobbing their heads, crying gobble-gobble and whatever else it is that turkeys do.
Those symbolic pardons may make the turkey eaters among us feel somewhat better about stuffing our faces with coma-inducing amounts of gravy-smothered poultry, yet during one such event in 2008, then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) managed to tear the mask (or head?) off the whole charade. We'll call it the greatest turkey-related disaster in the history of politics.
Fresh off a defeat in the 2008 presidential election, Palin headed to a turkey farm in her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, to pardon a local bird -- a common practice among governors.
Palin delivered her prepared remarks over frequent interruptions from clucking birds not as fortunate as the turkey getting the reprieve. She even touted herself as a "friend to all creatures great and small" before posing for a photo op.
What happened next was entirely unexpected. While many had recently learned that Palin could be unpredictable -- even a maverick, perhaps -- Americans couldn't have foreseen her conducting a lengthy on-camera interview while live birds were being fed into a machine of mass turkey murder mere feet behind her.
Palin seemed to unwittingly nail her remarks, commenting on the need to find "levity" in her job as turkey after turkey was decapitated by the metal cone of death in the background. The man shoving the struggling birds into the device even looked up toward Palin and the camera as the governor presciently predicted that the spectacle would invite skepticism.
(The goriest moments have been censored in the video above.)
Although her office later denied that she'd known what was playing out behind her, Palin was reportedly asked if she wanted that particular backdrop for her interview, to which she replied, "No worries."

 

 

Hey GOP, take the Palin cure

Still no actual news about what Palin is doing, just gossip.

From LATimes: Hey GOP, take the Palin cure

The Republican Party has been doing a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing since the presidential election. Half the conservative columnists and bloggers say the GOP lost because it overemphasized social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. The other half says the party didn't emphasize them enough. And everyone denounces Project ORCA, the campaign's attempt to turn out voters via technology.
But I've got a suggestion for cutting short the GOP angst: Sarah Palin for president in 2016.
You think I'm joking? Think again.

In 2008, Palin, running as my party's vice presidential candidate, was widely supposed to have cost John McCain the election. But that wasn't so. A national exit poll conducted by CNN asked voters whether Palin was a factor in their voting. Of those who said yes, 56% voted for McCain versus 43% for Barack Obama.
Furthermore, Mitt Romney, the GOP's anointed contender this year, got almost a million fewer votes than McCain did in 2008. (Meanwhile, President Obama, although winning reelection, lost far more voters than the Republicans, with nearly 7 million fewer voters checking his name on their ballots than did in 2008).
Millions of Americans didn't much care for Obama and his Obamacare spending blowout, but they didn't feel like voting for Romney either. Some said that Romney didn't resonate with recession-hit blue-collar folks in swing states because he "looked like the boss who outsourced their jobs," as one blog commenter quipped.
Gabriel Malor, writing for the New York Daily News' blog, pinpointed another reason: By focusing his campaign mostly on serious economic and political issues such as the national debt and tax incentives, Romney failed to take into account the fact that large segments of the electorate neither know nor care much about serious economic and political issues. What they — a group sometimes euphemistically called "uninformed voters" — do know and care about are the tugs on their emotions, fears, revulsions and heart strings provided by hours and hours of uninterrupted television watching .
The Democrats understood how to reach that constituency. When a barrage of Obama campaign TV ads told them that the GOP wanted to take away their contraceptives or that Bain Capital killed someone's wife, they took notice. When Obama strolled the hurricane-stricken beaches of New Jersey in his bomber jacket, they were snowed. As Malor put it, Obama won on "binders, Big Bird, birth control and blame Bush."
Palin can more than keep up with the Democrats in appealing to voters' emotions. Hardly anyone could be more blue collar than Palin, out on the fishing boat with her hunky blue-collar husband, Todd. Palin is "View"-ready, she's "Ellen"-ready, she's Kelly-and-Michael-ready.
A Palin "war against women"? Hah! Not only is she a woman, she's got a single-mom daughter, Bristol, to help with the swelling single-mom demographic. On social issues, Palin, unlike Romney, has been absolutely consistent. And let's remember that most Americans, whatever their view of choice, disapprove of most abortions.
Gay marriage? Palin opposes it. But she is also a strong advocate of states' rights, and I'm betting she'd be fine with letting states and their voters grapple with the issue on their own. Remember that all of America didn't swing toward approval of gay marriage on Nov. 6. Three reliably blue states and their voters did. If she were smart, Palin would recruit a member of her impressive gay fanboy base — yes, she has one — to help run her campaign. I nominate Kevin DuJan of the widely read gay conservative blog HillBuzz, a Palin stalwart since 2008.
Palin's son Track is an Iraq war veteran, so she can be proudly patriotic without being labeled another George W. Bush, looking to do aggressive nation-building. She seems aware there is only one nation in need of building right now: America.
Furthermore, looks count in politics, and Palin at age 48, has it all over her possible competition, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will be 69 by election day 2016 and who let someone talk her into adopting the flowing blond locks of a college student, making her look like Brunnhilde in a small-town Wagner production. Men love Sarah Palin, and she loves men.
She's tough as nails too. After Election 2008, she was supposed to have been through. This year eight of the 14 GOP candidates Palin endorsed for Congress won election or reelection, including tea party favorite Ted Cruz for a Senate seat in Texas.
Sure, there is going to be never-ending nastiness from the left, but she's already lived through that once. Katie Couric? A has-been. Tina Fey? Her shtick was already wearing thin in 2008.
There are also the snooty East Coast Republican intellectual types, such as Peggy Noonan, who look down their noses at a woman who doesn't shop at Neiman Marcus and didn't attend an Ivy League university. But Peggy made a fool of herself calling the election for Romney on Nov. 5. Who's going to care what she and her ilk have to say next time?
Some Republicans will say Palin has too much baggage from 2008, and we need to look for a new Sarah Palin. But I don't see what's wrong with the one we've got. Ever since the 1990s, Republicans have been looking for the next Ronald Reagan. Reagan is now revered in bipartisan circles, but during his presidency he was, like Palin, ridiculed by liberals. They cited "Bedtime for Bonzo" and sneered at his no-name college degree.
Sarah Palin is the new Ronald Reagan: charming and affable and unwilling to back down if she's right. I can't see what's wrong with that.
Charlotte Allen writes frequently about feminism, politics and religion.

 

 

No news from Sarah Palin?

Just did a Google News Search on Sarah Palin and there are no new headlines...

There's one that compares an actress as "the next Sarah Palin" i.e. here today and gone tomorrow, but no news about her.

Sarah Palin finds comfort in Corinthians

Palin cited the Bible verse in a Facebook post to her supporters. | AP Photo

By KEVIN CIRILLI | 11/7/12 12:13 PM EST 

 

 

Sarah Palin urged her supporters in a Facebook message on Wednesday not to “lose heart” now that President Barack Obama has defeated Mitt Romney, but she warned the president’s “socialist policies” will hurt the middle class.

Sarah Palin urged her supporters in a Facebook message on Wednesday not to “lose heart” now that President Barack Obama has defeated Mitt Romney, but she warned the president’s “socialist policies” will hurt the middle class.

“America, don’t lose heart. This election is not an ‘Obama mandate,’ nor is it a rejection of conservatism,” wrote Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee. “As I personally have witnessed, once a bell is rung by a biased media, it’s impossible to un-ring it. Ironically, it’s Obama’s socialist policies that will destroy America’s working class as he outsources opportunities.”

She continued: “Hang in there, America. Fight for what is right. Don’t look to government or any politician to solve your problems. Government can’t make you happy, healthy, wealthy or wise. Obama is a master at reading the right “soaring” words fed into his teleprompter, but actions speak louder than words. So, hold tight to 2 Corinthians 4:8 because we’re in for a wild ride. We must survive. United. One nation under God.”
She then cited the Bible verse in her Facebook post: “We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed.”

Bristol Palin Bar Heckler Lawsuit Tossed

From ABC News:  Bristol Palin Bar Heckler Lawsuit Tossed

A defamation lawsuit filed by a man who made headlines for heckling Bristol Palin in a California bar has been tossed out, her attorney John Tiemessen told ABC News.
In September 2011, Palin was heckled at a West Hollywood bar and restaurant by a man who called her mom, 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, a “whore” and made a crude reference about Bristol’s former relationship with Levi Johnston, the father of her 3-year-old son, Tripp .
Stephen Hanks’ lawsuit noted that Palin suggested he is a homosexual during their exchange, which occurred while she was shooting a segment for her Lifetime series, “Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp.” Hanks claims he’s been featured in ads for the show despite the fact that he never signed a waiver.
Hanks also states that Palin falsely claimed to a magazine that the incident was the reason why she moved from Los Angeles back to her native Alaska. He argues that Palin bought a home in Alaska two months before the incident.
Hanks has been ordered to pay Palin’s attorney’s fees.

 

Sarah Palin’s Facebook endorsement

From Washington Post blog, Compost:  Sarah Palin’s Facebook endorsement

Well, Sarah Palin has finally declared her full-throated support of Mitt Romney.
On Facebook.
Less than two days before the election.
But hey, it’s the thought that counts.
And frankly, this is the endorsement equivalent of an e-card.
As a friend of mine once quipped, “Nothing says, ‘I completely and entirely forgot’ like an e-card.”
On her Facebook page, the former Alaska governor wrote: “This Tuesday our country’s future is in our hands. What’s past is prologue. We know what we will get from a second Obama term because we’ve all endured his first term. We know how well he kept his 2008 campaign promises. Do we really believe he’ll keep his 2012 promises?”
She continues in this vein for some time, finally making it to Mitt Romney five paragraphs before the end, noting, “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have offered a credible alternative to Barack Obama’s failed policies. Governor Romney understands how the free market works. His pro-growth economic policies will benefit all Americans. He has promised to move us toward energy independence, deficit reduction, and responsible entitlement reform that honors our commitment to our seniors and keeps faith with future generations. Governor Romney deserves a chance to lead. President Obama had his chance. He’s failed, and we can’t afford to go backwards.”
If this were any more lukewarm, you could take uncomfortable baths in it.
This endorsement has a clear message, and that message is: “Wait, the election is tomorrow?”