By Nicole Coulter
Governor Sarah Palin endorsed 67 winning candidates in last year’s historic midterm election, a nearly 70% winning ratio.
So, yeah, she knows how to pick candidates.
And now the Anyone But Palin crowd would like her to keep on picking candidates, including endorsing someone other than herself for president in next year’s primaries. That’s why they use the following bizarre political terms to describe her:
“Kingmaker”
“Coronator” (Is that even a word?)
“Cheerleader”
But this isn’t really out of any deep respect for her endorsement power. It’s because deep down they know Sarah Palin would defeat their favorite candidate for the nomination.
Oh, they’ll tell you it’s because she’s weak and that’s why they don’t want her to run, but notice how they’re not asking Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain or any of the actual weak candidates to drop out of the race and “king make”?
(By the way, I think Mitt Romney would make a lovely queenmaker. He tried once already to become president and failed so why not cheerlead for a change? Lord knows we would welcome his endorsement. But whatever he decides, it’s cool.)
These Anyone But Palin types may also tell you they’re worried that Palin would win the nomination but lose embarrassingly to Obama in the general election. Which basically tells you right there that they have no faith in their own g**dam* party to nominate the “right” person, and begs the question:
Who is the right person to defeat President Obama?
And, isn’t that what primaries are supposed to be all about deciding?
In the absence of a primary, would the party elders simply convene in their undisclosed villa and hand-select their favorite guy for the job of unseating a sitting president whose favorability ratings are sliding faster than melted butter off a hot waffle?
I mean, really, primaries are about deciding who can best represent the party and defeat the other party’s nominee. It’s supposed to be like, a competition, isn’t it? For party poo bahs or others in the conservative media to suggest that a former VP candidate and accomplished governor (with her own independent documentary to prove it) shouldn’t even run? It’s horse manure. They’re telling the grassroots Tea Party activist and the average conservative voter that one of the most popular leaders in the conservative movement, a woman who leads the field in favorability in her own party, shouldn’t even compete for the nomination?
Ah, but Herman Cain can run. No problem.
Sarah Palin received 60 million votes for vice president just three years ago. (By comparison, Mitt Romney got four million votes in the last cycle.) Her electrifying convention speech and massive campaign rallies were the Tea Party in utero. She rightly is credited along with CNBC’s Rick Santelli with helping inspire a spontaneous grassroots movement across the country that led to an historic 69-seat pick-up for Republicans last fall, and a visible refudiation of President Obama’s agenda. After the party of Bush was left for dead in 2008, Palin and the grassroots Tea Party movement restored it to relevance and gave weeping John Boehner back the speakership.
And this inspiring figure should not run for president? (Or will choose not to run because she’s just a mindless celebrity, after all, who is too damaged to win. Right … ) But others without that impressive resume should run? (I’m sorry, I missed where Michelle Bachmann had her own midterm endorsement tracker on the Washington Post. Maybe they only do that for celebrity kingmakers who shouldn’t run for president.)
It’s kinda backward, ain’t it? Oh, well, we know the real reason they want Palin out. It’s because they can’t beat her.
If you’re Sarah Palin, what’s the down side of running? Not much. As Bristol let slip in a recent interview, even if the family decided to relocate permanently to an igloo in the North Pole, only to surface every other leap year, they would still be criticized by the media, and never left alone, so why not try to make a difference?
And if you’re Sarah Palin, what are your possibilities in 2012? (Hat tip to a C4P commenter for pointing this out. I forget who exactly so please raise your hand in the comments if this was you, so I can give you credit for the idea.)
Possibility A: Run and lose the primary, and be like Ronald Reagan in 1976, primed for another potential run at the White House.
Possibility B: Run and win the primary, lose the general election, and be like Barry Goldwater, laying the groundwork for Ronald Reagan and a generation of staunch conservatives who followed, not to mention becoming the first ever woman nominated by a major party, and an inspiration for conservative women everywhere.
Possiblity C: Run, win the primary, and win the general election, becoming the first woman president, and the first Tea Party president, with a mandate to drastically reduce the size of the federal government, and restore the Constitutional limits on government’s power.
Possibility D: Don’t run, make some winning endorsements, write a few more books, and be forever like Geraldine Ferraro, God rest her soul, while watching your country slide further into the socialist abyss, knowing you could have been president, and fixed it.
Facing those possibilities, what would you choose?
Run, make history and save your country, or sit around the Fox studios providing commentary on less inspiring candidates?
I think it’s pretty obvious which way Governor Palin is leaning. Because she’s saying things that a presidential candidate would say. When she directly addressed President Obama in Madison, Wisc., in a snowstorm, in a union town, with the words, “Game On” what else was that if not a direct challenge? In fact, she’s been issuing ‘Game On’-like direct challenges to Obama since Sept. 3, 2008 (an unbroken string of direct challenges that no other candidate in the Republican Party can match.)
You can probably quote most of her best zingers by heart:
I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.
- In small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening.
- We tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.
- Our state budget is under control. We have a surplus.
- Listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state Senate.
- When the cloud of rhetoric has passed … when the roar of the crowd fades away … when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot — what exactly is our opponent’s plan?
- What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet?
- The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
- A special welcome to the C-SPAN cameras … you may not be welcome inside the healthcare negotiations, but you’re welcome here at the Tea Party.
- To win that war … we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lecturn.
- How’s that Hopey-Changey stuff workin’ out for ya?
- This movement is about the people. Remember all political power is inherent in the PEOPLE. And government is supposed to be working for the people. That’s what this movement is all about.No doubt you’ve got conservative friends, wimpy Eeyore types, who see the glass half empty, who are probably convinced Palin couldn’t beat Obama so why risk it, right?
Why don’t you encourage them to fly up to Alaska and check in with ex-Wasilla mayor John Stein and ex-Alaska governor Frank Murkowski for commentary on whether Palin possesses the ability to unseat entrenched, heavily funded incumbents. It’ll be an interesting, short conversation, punctuated no doubt with some colorful language.
And why don’t we check in with other “top” GOP talent (Romney, Huntsman, Pawlenty) who have never beaten any incumbent at any time in their careers for insights into how they might suddenly and without precedent morph into bonafide, 24-carat-Obama stoppers. That will be an even shorter conversation, filled with plenty of ums and blank stares.
GAME ON means GAME ON.
And kingmaking is horse manure.
What more can we say?
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