The rumors of Sarah Palin’s political death have been greatly exaggerated. For nearly three years now, we have heard media pundit after media pundit tell us that she was not intelligent enough, not popular enough and not serious enough to be president. Reporters, columnists and pundits have written thousands of columns, spent countless hours on TV and cable news programs and have talked themselves hoarse at cocktail parties trying to convince us that Sarah Palin was a flash in the pan, and that she was done. Yet the wheels keep turning.
This is a story about someone who once “drove” the Alaska state bus, which had its tires flattened by bloggers and frivolous ethics complainants. This is a tale of a woman who rode on the McCain bus only to be quickly thrown under it following his loss to Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign. Now she has her own bus.
When Sarah Palin was nominated for the Republican vice presidential spot, the Obama campaign, the DNC and the media set out to destroy her. As Monica Crowley has said, “Sarah Palin represents an existential threat to liberalism.” Therefore she had to be stopped at all costs. Day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year, the media poked her, lied about her and demanded that she sit down and shut up.
These great intellectuals of the written word were the self-anointed formulators of the processes that all politicians would have to adhere to if they wanted to get elected to higher office. Only those with sophistication, an open mind toward moral and social relativism need apply. Only those who would prostrate themselves before the altar of the new world order, the green movement, the pro-choice movement and the intellectual engineers of all the people living life in a peaceful Utopia, would curry great favor and live protected lives where power would be theirs provided that they “divvy up with the boys.”
Then she came along.
You can imagine the sweat on the brows of those who feverishly sent messages back and forth to each other on the Journolist listserv. You could just imagine the Obama campaign operatives calling emergency meetings. Even the awkward political threesome between moderate Democrats, moderate Republicans and lobbyists was suddenly under just as much of a direct threat as liberalism was. The Republican establishment, long part of that game, didn’t see her as their meal ticket to political domination. Instead of standing up and backing a fellow Republican, they locked the doors and hid the skeletons deep in their closets. They saw that the days of the merchants peddling their wares in the Temple were about to end.
You don't hear people using the phrase “you can’t beat city hall” much anymore. You can thank the Tea Party for this. This once silent majority who stayed home and just took it, now have a voice. They are members of the non-privileged class that makes up a majority of the citizenry, yet were once unable to fight power, money and corruption in a political system that took our country from Great Depression to Great Recession without lining a single pocket but those of their own.
It is as comforting to citizens who long for the days of Morning in America as it is discomforting for those in both political machines to know that there is someone out there with the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington attitude and that there is strength in numbers in a movement known as the Tea Party.
How symbolically ironic it is that the press which once demanded that Sarah Palin bow before it or take on the slings and arrows of smear, lies and innuendo now chases her, reduced to being called paparazzi - a description beneath their fragile egotistical view of themselves.
Palin once dodged the bullets of the media, her name dragged through the mud and her governorship destroyed by a concerted effort of those who could not tolerate anything less than an Armani suit with a good pedigree to lead them, or at least do their dirty bidding for them.
How ironic it is that Sarah Palin once called on the press to treat her fairly and to "stop making things up" and now the press is complaining that she's not treating them fairly. She has turned these once powerful elites into Monty Python's flying circus.
The Republicans have good candidates. But the choice here is between candidates who can run the country properly and one who can bring the country back to greatness again. The choice here is to nominate the lesser of two evils and vote for them against Obama or to nominate someone who has not only taken on and taken down the political establishment in her own state, but who now poises herself to do the same for the rest of the country. We can stop Obama by voting for someone who can return to business as usual or we can stop Obama by voting for someone who can restore this thing and bring it back to being the shining city it was meant to be.
If there is any indication as to who can take one term to get it straight and two terms to make it great, just look at the $12 billion surplus that Alaska runs today. Just look at how many jobs, direct and collateral, that can be created by unleashing America's industrial giant and by opening up oil and gas exploration and resource development here at home. Imagine the prosperity that would be created by a truly free market that rewards producers when we bring it back in place of the current crony capitalist-socialist hybrid system that currently punishes success and subsidizes failure.
The media may have led you to believe otherwise. But the wheels on Sarah Palin's bus continue to roll. If we let that bus go all the way, we will some day look back on this nightmare and thank God it's over. She can lead us to the days ahead where we can feel that same pride and experience that same prosperity as we did the last time someone in America took on the establishment and won.
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