Allahpundit has an excellent article about all the Presidential-prep stuff Sarah Palin is doing, and some of the normal Presidential-run stuff she’s not doing. Do read the whole thing, but to boil it down – she’s getting together the means of a massive, grass-roots campaign, spreading campaign cash around in key States, but she isn’t building the normal political infrastructure of a campaign. Is she getting in? Is she just thinking about it? Or is she just getting in to it differently than most establishment candidates?
As for me, I’m still not sure she’s in. There is certainly a lot of prep work being done, but I still don’t see the definitive information which would make me think she’s going to go for it. In fact, of all the 2012 prospects, Mitt Romney is the only person I count as “in” (and even he’s still got some wiggle room to gracefully withdraw if the polls in mid-2011 don’t favor him).
On the other hand, as I’ve said before, if Palin runs, she gets the Republican nomination. To be sure, a great deal of the GOP establishment would be against her (but not all, she’s built some bridges to some parts of it) and the MSM would go in to an orgy of anti-Palin screeches…but, she’d win it, if she sought it. Only someone more “outsider” than Palin could take it away from her.
The fact that the liberal establishment entirely and the GOP establishment partially despises her is the key to understanding why she’d win: the people are heartily sick of the establishment. Allahpundit notes that a lot of GOP prospects are setting up to run on a “competence” platform against Obama’s manifest failures. A good idea, but it doesn’t capture the mood of the electorate, especially the GOP electorate. Obama was said to be competent – he was going to replace the supposedly incompetent Bush, remember?
What is wanted is someone who will be on the side of the people – just as the Democrat primary in 2008 revolved around who was least like Bush (and that was why I picked Obama out as the Democrat nominee as early as September of 2007), the 2012 GOP primary will revolve around who is least like the people in government. Romney has many good points; so does Pawlenty. Mitch Daniels has been a superb governor of Indiana. Any one of them, nominated by the GOP, would get my enthusiastic support against Obama – but can any one of them credibly present themselves as outsiders who will go to DC to clean out the crooks who have wrecked our nation?
Not hardly. To find someone with her ability to do this, you’d have to go to Christie in New Jersey (the only man, I think, who could possibly derail Palin in the primaries), or to Allen West in Florida (but he’s not even managed to win a House seat…his time will come, but not before 2016, at the earliest). Outsiders. Anti-government. People vs Powerful. The Second American Revolution.
That is what 2012 will be – and if Palin runs, she wins.
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