American Politics: Sarah Palin won't run

By Tom Switzer

She’s back! Sarah Palin is running — in a half-marathon, that is. But the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate is still contemplating a bid for the White House, and she says she will make a formal announcement on whether she will run in the GOP primaries by the end of the month.

What was said of the “New Nixon” in 1967-68 could be said of the former Alaska governor: she’s “fit, tanned and ready.” Or is the 47-year-old mother of five merely teasing the media and devoting her life to family, lucrative book writing, hosting her own reality television show, and playing the role of patron saint to a growing band of Tea Partiers?

Who knows? But one thing is certain: if she does enter the Republican primaries, her run will not reflect the conventional path to the White House.

Start with some history. Since at least World War II, all but three presidents have hailed directly from elected office, and those who did not run had far more impressive CVs than the two-and-a-half year Alaska governor.

Ronald Reagan was a successful two-term governor of California (1966-74) who spent the next six years as the leading spokesman for the conservative cause before his 1980 landslide election against Jimmy Carter.

Richard Nixon was a congressman, senator, and a two-term vice-president who became a Republican Party elder statesman for eight years in the political wilderness before his 1968 triumph against Hubert Humphrey.

And Dwight Eisenhower was a 5-star US general who rescued Western Europe from Nazism before winning the White House in 1952 and winning re-election in 1956, twice against Adlai Stevenson.

Palin’s record — small-town mayor, governor of a remote and lowly populated state, failed campaign for vice-president, quit her governorship with nearly 18 months remaining in her first term — is hardly in the same league as the above.

But if she runs for the White House, her premature decision to quit politics more than two years ago will merely reinforce doubts about her ability to handle what the Americans call prime time.

In the 2008 election campaign, the firebrand failed numerous economic and foreign policy tests, and her responses to several all-important issues sounded more like mealy-mouthed spin than sound judgment.

Charismatic and impressive though she was at first glance, as the campaign gathered steam, more and more voters became uneasy about the prospect of Palin being a heartbeat away from the presidency — a concern that took on extra meaning when John McCain would have been the oldest man ever elected to the White House.

True, her anti-abortion, pro-gun, and anti-tax views, together with her folksy, gut-level appeal to lower middle-class Americans (“Reagan Democrats”), provided ideological red meat for the Republican Party's social conservative base, which had grave misgivings about her running mate. It is also true the same qualities that attract the Tea Party would also appeal to the GOP conservative base in the Republican primaries.

But she faces stiff competition to woo this important voting bloc from the Texas Governor Rick Perry and Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, both of whom have already appeared to have won much of the Tea Party support.

It is also true none of her weaknesses as a candidate has justified the Left’s irrational hatred of the glamorous governor.

It is bizarre, indeed disturbing, how Palin — a working mum who was only the second female vice-presidential candidate in US history — has driven feminists and so-called progressives into fits of condescension and contempt.

Still, widespread doubts remain about her policy depth and personal judgment.

The consensus among more seasoned veterans of the conservative punditocracy and talking head circuit is that she is unfit for office. The distinguished conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has argued the anti-intellectual populist is “a fatal cancer to the Republican party” because her inclination “is not only to scorn (left) liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely”. 

The Washington Post’s George Will and the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan have said similar things in recent years.

So my bet, for what it’s worth, is that Sarah Palin won’t run for the Republican presidential nomination. Which means that the onus is on other Tea Party-backed Republicans, most notably Perry, to do the hard policy work and sound philosophical thinking to present a credible conservative alternative to Mitt Romney in the party’s nomination.

5 September 2011