Have they been just dormant, and not dead?
If everything continues to align as it is now, a woman will indeed be President in 2012, be it Hillary or Sarah…and we will work our heart and souls out for her on the ground whichever one it is who takes on Dr. Utopia because we just can’t let this man have a second term.
They haven’t forgotten, and a lot of Democrats have started to figure out what they already knew about The One. It will be interesting.
I think that’s possible. My empirical observation is that Obama can easily grate on the middle-aged woman, with his ocasional there, there honey mannerisms. Maybe he’s the guy with the really flash car and smooth confidence on a date who also, as it turns out, can’t hold down a steady job, has credit problems, and recoils in disgust from a dirty diaper.
It will rest on whether steady Democratic women, particularly single and young married white women, can bring themselves to vote for a Republican, since it’s very hard to see Obama losing the primary. Would they pull the switch for Palin? I dunno. Maybe if she adds a few more obvious wrinkles in three years, so she is somewhat less likely to make their menfolk smirk annoyingly about MILFs, and maybe if she starts speaking in conciliatory, big-tent, reach-across-the-aisle ways that attracted many of them to Obama.
The funny thing is, my vague impression (I’m no expert here) is that women tend to be more confident about their judgment of whether to trust men for national-level leaders than of whether to trust other women. I wonder if that’s true?
I think it is wishful thinking it could be Hillary. She can’t win without the Black vote and if she did secure the nomination away from an incumbent Obama, the damage to the party would be so severe it could be permanent and fatal. She would drive at least half the Black vote out of the party.
So, by all means, I support a run by Hillary!
I actually believe Hillary when she says she’s not interested in running again. She never struck me as someone who loves politics, the way her husband does. I don’t think she’s willing to dive into the sewer (as she sees it) again. I suspected that as soon as she took Barack’s offer of Secretary of State. Really, she’d have been much better positioned for election staying in the Senate. Imagine how visible she’d have been right now, with the Senate so critical on health care “reform,” and her own seat in New York absolutely safe. She could be the Olympia Snow of the Democrats.
I really don’t like the idea of supporting candidates because they satisfy some kind of politically correct “diversity” goal. Anyone who votes for Hillary or Sarah or Bobby Jindal or anyone else without being absolutely certain they would still vote for them if they were middle-aged white guys, could be setting themselves up for the same kind of extreme disillusionment that is descending upon a growing number of Obama voters.
Obama is a pimp-daddy. Typical. The USA voted him as prez.
What worries me a bunch is the fact that he has all the sooper-sekret stuff that those of us sweated out to see if we even had jobs way back when. Now a communist Kenyan is prez.
Pimp-daddy.
Ann Althouse on Sarah Palin:
It seems that Sarah Palin wasn’t able or didn’t want to bother to analyze whether she was ready to debut on the big media stage, and she wasn’t large-minded enough to think beyond herself to what it would mean for the whole campaign. That is, she was dumb. She was too dumb to handle campaign responsibilities properly, so she was clearly too dumb to step into the role of President of the United States.
Could she build up her political intelligence? Might she have it now or by 2012? If these 2 pages of “Going Rogue” are any evidence, she is displaying her weaknesses all over again, and she is still too dumb to be President. And, most scarily, she doesn’t know how dumb she still is.
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2009/11/sarah-palin-is-dumb.html
Bill,
There is a saying:
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
In ’12, Obama will be the blind man. ANYONE the Republicans run will be king, even if they are sub-standard.
Color me unimpressed and frankly contemptuous, Bill. Politicians who indulge in the sort of super meta existential hall o’ mirrors psychological analysis conveyed in Althouses’s quoted paragraphs — instead of, you know, just saying what the hell they think and feel and believe, damn the consequences — make me sick. I’m nauseated by the whole triangulating, focus-grouping, lying shifty ah yes what the candidate MEANT to say was Monday-morning get me rewrite quick lot.
To hell with them. I want a man (or woman) who just says what he thinks and believes straight out, regardless of whether that can be spun by media sleazoids in icky ways, or whether it focus-groups well. I can tolerate a certain amount of plain honest disagreement with my own values and goals. I’m not looking for Jesus Christ. But I’d rather vote for an honest plain-spoken politician with whom I disagree 60% than with a sneaky chameleon with whom I seem to disagree only 20% on election day. I know who is more likely to betray me.
I have a feeling a lot of people feel this way, and this is part of what makes Sarah Palin popular. Presumably Althouse does not, but then she’s an Obama voter, and hence one who can be successfully and pretty easily conned by a bullshit artist. Nice lady and all that, but I wouldn’t take her advice on politics under any circumstances.
And, most scarily, she doesn’t know how dumb she still is. And there are no limits to her ambition.
A natural successor to Bush and Obama, alas.
Some politicians convey that there are shrewdness, intelligence and substance behind their folksy manner. (E.g., for those who are old enough to remember, Sam Ervin.) Not Palin, afaic.
I got fed up with Palin’s folksiness a lot faster than I got fed up with Bush’s smirk.
I guess another point is the implication here that raw intelligence is the ne plus ultra of political leadership. I can understand that attitude among law professors.
But I don’t think that way. I don’t think that, for example, we’d be best off selecting the President from only among members of Mensa, or those who score 800s on their SATs. Intelligence is a nice commodity, but the success of a President doesn’t rest on being able to solve integrals quickly or speak four languages or quote Cicero persuasively. Quite frankly, any time the President needs smartness, he can call upon the best brains in the nation to think things out for him.
By me, what the President needs above all else is character and fortitude. He’s got to be able to inspire loyalty quickly, be a very quick and accurate intuitive judge of men, have a rock-solid internal moral compass, be compassionate and humble, yet sure of his ground, and have the guts and stamina to stick with what’s right even in the face of the perfect political shitstorm.
Criticism of Sarah Palin on character grounds is something to which I’d listen, wondering. Telling me she’s dumb — bzzt, no sale. I’m not interested. If she’s smart enough to run a state while raising some little kids, that’s smart enough for me, and the remaining questions have to do with her character and values only.
Someone who voted for Obama (e.g., Althouse) isn’t exactly in a position to be calling anyone else dumb.
I guess another point is the implication here that raw intelligence is the ne plus ultra of political leadership. I can understand that attitude among law professors.
Really? If those guys are so smart, why didn’t they go into mathematics, engineering or the sciences? 🙂 For the record, I have a friend who is a law professor and he is pretty smart.
I love how Democrats assume that everyone’s mannerisms have GOT to be fake, cultivated, a put-on…
…except Barack Obama’s, Bill Clinton’s, Al Gore’s, Jimmy Carter’s…
Here’s the best reason to keep looking at Palin as a Presidential possibility. She scares the snot out of the DNC.
If she was as dumb as they say, she’d be off their radar. She’d be a null topic. She’d have been two jokes on each of the late night shows, and we would have never heard from her again.
So far, I like her. But I like Jindal and Paul too.
The question is, do the brainiacs that work for Michael Steele truly want a great candidate, a real old fashioned conservative, or simply a new and improved candidate “X” (where, like dish soap, they’ve changed the wrapper, not the product) . Will Steele support another semi-moderate, semi-Bush, quasi-McCain, a Giuliani wanna be? Not sure who it will be, Jeff Sessions? Mitch McConnell?
I don’t think the boys at the head of the Republican party will push a white woman, or a brown man.
A pity.
The problem with Althouse’s analysis is it basically ignores the elephant in the room, Senator John McCain. He was the Presidential candiate, it was his campaign, not Palin’s. Our political history is replete with VP candiates who were “made over” when selected (consider Bush for Reagan, or Lieberman for Gore). Palin didn’t pick herself to be VP, McCain picked her.
But even if everything Althouse wrote is true and relevant, Palin would still have been the least unqualified person of the set of McCain, Obama, Biden, Clinton, and Palin.
Carl’s absolutely right about intelligence in a candidate. I should know better than most. In October I was elected to a leadership post in Metro Washington Mensa. Some of our members people here would cheerfully follow to the gates of hell and back. I know of at least one currently active military reservist and one retired Air Force officer in our group. They are fine people. Some people do compliment me on my leadership abilities. I actually listen to people, for example. Then there is the member lots of us wish would simply go away. Leadership ability? Possibly negative. Doesn’t listen to anyone.
In 2008 I actually thought McCain was going to pick a woman as his Vice Presidential candidate — and that the choice would make things very difficult for the Democratic ticket. Who did I think he was going to pick? Former New Jersey governor and EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman. I think that would have been a much better pick than Palin. Whitman is smarter than Palin, more independent, open minded and has far more leadership experience.
……….and far too liberal to balance the ticket Chuck
If McCain was gonna pick a Democrat, he was gonna pick Lieberman not Whitman. Palin was the difference between losing and getting shellacked.
>..But even if everything Althouse wrote is true and relevant, Palin would
> still have been the least unqualified person of the set of McCain, Obama,
> Biden, Clinton, and Palin.
Sad but true. On theplus side – everything Althouse wrote is definatly not true.
Also she really excites crowds. Something McCain quickly became very bitter about. Watch the speech when he introduced her. In seconds she had the crowd more pumped up then McCain had — and he was looking at the crowds reaction and her – and was upset.
All,
Whitman is a Republican. She supports, among other things, nuclear power. She was Republican George Bush’s EPA Administrator until she could not stand him anymore.
Yes, she is a prochoice Republican. The religious right apparently does not like her. Too bad. I don’t like them.
People from places like New Jersey (sample of one: me) view McCain as a solid conservative. Whitman was needed for balance. She is viewed by most people as a centrist.
Now it is off to a party. The rest of the weekend will be spent in meatspace.
>..view McCain as a solid conservative.
???
That’s bizarre. McCain’s one of the most liberal Republicans I can think of. Long contemptuous of conservatives, long a big gov, big spending, moderate-liberal. Hence why he was courted by Kerry as a Dem VP for ’04.
Frequently his positions change as most benefits him, and obviously in his pres campaign he professed to reverse his positions on many things to appeal to conservatives. But I can’t see how McCain can be classed as a solid conservative.
Death panels.
Sarah Palin is controlling the terms of the debate. Oh, she didn’t even come up with the term “death panels”: that came from the opposition seeking to discredit the former Alaska Governer. But the term death panels did more to the Health Care Reform bill than Sarah Palin.
I get the impression that a lot of the “Palin is dumb” meme comes from the facts that she isn’t from the annointed Ivy League. Horror of horrors, her father was a teacher so she had to find other ways to get through college (plural in her case) such as schlorships from beauty pagents. Add to that the fact that she disagrees with the feminists and she must be destroyed.
The fact of the matter is that she was the only thing that got me to vote for McCain last year. While I respect his military service, I despise him as a politician. I suspect there are a lot more people who felt the same way I did than who thought McCain was a “solid conservative.”
Kelly,
I know people in my area (DC suburbs) who are Republican and view McCain as a conservative. He might break ranks on some issues, but most people locally rank him as conservative. I’d like a poll of Republicans to determine where they think he stands in the party.
Chuck, why would you imagine that Republicans in general, and Maryland Republicans in particular, are conservative, or would reliably recognize one?
In fact, John McCain was not nominated by Republicans. He was nominated by independents and cross-over Democrats in open primaries. Close the Republican primaries, and don’t split the conservative vote among several other candidates, and he would never have had a chance of being nominated.
Jay Cost over at RealClearPolitics has a column that perfectly exemplifies the bewildement of coastal elites for the distinctions flyover country draws between, for example, Sarah Palin and John McCain.
Jay makes the by now absolutely classic pratfall mistake of thinking that the country divides into those who dislike big business (Democrats — yay government!) and those who dislike big government (Republicans — yay business!), and that we sway back and forth between whether we want to be told what to do by the CEO of General Electric or by the Secretary of Energy. McCain, with his faith in a certain type of For Your Own Good regulation, and John Kerry or Hillary Clinton, with another very similar type of faith, are pretty much first cousins in this world. And I can see how this world seems like a good one, and all there is, if you by preference live in a beehive city, and function as a nice shiny cog in a giant government or business machine.
What escapes the attention here is that large swathes of people out in the hinterlands are still, even after two full centuries of industirialism, Jeffersonian Republicans. They trust neither big government nor big business. It’s the whole ‘big’ adjective that revolts them. They don’t want big anything — not big government, not big business, not big unions, not big dominating cultgural myths that force everyone to think in lockstep, not big 1,000 page reform bills that reshape everything under the sun, not big causes (green jobs! Save the Whales! Climate change!) that swallow up all the rest of private life in pursuit of one quasi-reliigious Second Coming goal.
These are the lovers of individual liberty. Give me small businesses, with whom I can deal, person to person, and which gives me a wide choice of style of doing business, so I can pick and choose. Give me small government, which may offer to help me here and there, and takes care of things I can’t do individually, but tends to leave the basic process of solving life’s problems and getting ahead in my hands, and that of people I know and trust. Give me a variety of small causes — laptops for veterans, the Red Cross, Nature Conservancy, appliance efficiency, private rockets to outer space — from which I can choose the one that please my personal goals and aspirations the most. Give me choice, give me a smorgasbord not a prix fixe menu, let my social life be a cafeteria, not a school lunchroom or military mess hall serving turkey and mashed potatoes and nothing else to absolutely everybody.
In short, let the individual be as free as possible, and damn collectivist group-thinking and group decision-making. We are not insects!
Chuck Devine and Ann Althouse have charitably come forth to demonstrate why the franchise is wasted on the overeducated and intellectually self-impressed. Althouse’s class prejudice was blindingly obvious during the late campaign and it’s now pretty clear that it was more about Palin than Obama.
Whitman, indeed. Sometimes I think that possession of a postgraduate degree ought to disenfranchise the holder, like a felony conviction.
Carl,
I could introduce you to a very liberal Democrat in my area who would say the same thing that you just did. I share many — possibly most — of those sentiments.
Rand, Maryland Republicans would be very surprised to find out that they had no real conservatives in their ranks. Our previous Republican governor endorsed a true conservative against sitting Congressman Wayne Gilchrist saying it was time a real conservative held that seat. That’s why that district now is represented by Democrat Frank Kratovil.
Mitch, your contempt for people whom you perceive as “over educated” and who disagree with you is quite unattractive. BTW, my last name is Divine, not Devine. Can’t you read? How does the contempt feel when it is directed at you?
FWIW, in 1980 and 1984 I voted for Reagan. In 1988 Bush. By 1992 I — like a good bit of the country — had had enough so I voted, more than a little bit reluctantly, for Clinton.
As far as being an elitist, in a few ways I am. In others I am not. The notion that the “salt of the earth” are wiser than people who have attended a respected university is simply bunk.
Rand, Maryland Republicans would be very surprised to find out that they had no real conservatives in their ranks.
So would I, since I didn’t make such a claim.
I could introduce you to a very liberal Democrat in my area who would say the same thing that you just did
Well then he better be voting conserative Republican next year, or he’s an idiot. Anyone who shares Don’t Tread On Me Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death sentiments who votes Democratic in 2008 or 2010 is suffering from a serious mental disconnect. Perhaps mistaking what Democrats say versus what they do.
I don’t doubt that there comes a time when you need to throw Republicans out of power because they’ve become fat pigs swilling at the public trough themselves. I don’t say 2006 wasn’t a reasonable time to do so. We have a tradition in America of throwing the bums out every now and then to keep them from getting comfortable, and by and large it’s a good one. I just wish we could not toss the baby out with the bathwater and consistently reward with long terms in office any legislator, in either party, who again and again came down on the side of the taxpayer, the liberty of the individual, and modest, accountable, incremental, and cost-efficient government.
The notion that the “salt of the earth” are wiser than people who have attended a respected university is simply bunk.
No it’s not. It depends on what the subject for the wisdom is. If we’re talking about whether to use H2/LOX on a rocket or nitrous oxide and rubber, then, yes, we’re best to listen to guys with engineering degrees (and experience). If we want to know how Cicero pronounced vene, vide, vinci then of course a PhD professor is the man to ask.
But if the questions are more like: should your mother get treatment X or Y for her cancer? Can you afford this house? Should you drive to work or take a bus or train? Should you put money away for your retirement, a house downpayment, or your kid’s college education? — in other words, if the questions are about the “salt of the earth’s” own personal life, then, absolutely, the salt of the earth guy is far, far smarter on that subject than any carpetbagger intellectual from government or academia trying to tell him what to do.
Chuck, I could care less how you spell your name, nor what you think of me. No, wait, that’s not true – it sort of gives me a warm little fuzzy feeling to have a card-carrying member of Mensa disapprove of me. You’re clearly dumber than rocks, which seems true of most members of that august society of self-selected elect.
To be honest, I wouldn’t actually disenfranchise holders of advanced degrees. I simply find some highly vocal members of that class of people to be alarmingly institutionalized, in much the same manner as the proverbial felon, made unfit for life outside of stir by long months or years inside the grey confines. Not all postgrads are politically retarded; most holders of masters’ degrees which I know are sensible. Excepting, notably, the one yahoo whose stint in an ecological postgrad program rotted his mind and left him an Obama booster.
> McCain — While I respect his military service, I despise him as a
> politician. I suspect there are a lot more people who felt the same
> way I did than who thought McCain was a “solid conservative.”
Yeah, he had no real support amoung conservatives even in the republican party. Most after he was nominated were arguing if they should just sit it out, and hpe 4 years of horror under Obama will bring someone good out.
Personall I hold McCain in contempt for the way hes brown nosed adn named droped his way through life — and carefully explains it with flatering half truths.
As for him being conservative – maybe on social issues I’m not interested in enough to pay attention to. Other then that – theirs damn little difference between him and Obama.
>==
>… What escapes the attention here is that large swathes of people
> out in the hinterlands are still, even after two full centuries of
> industirialism, Jeffersonian Republicans. They trust neither big
> government nor big business. It’s the whole ‘big’ adjective that revolts them. ==
There is a general disgust for the established powers. Not just in “fly-over country”. Both parts are good ol boys clubs (like McCain coming down on his supporters who wanted him to go after Obama. Obamas a member of the club. Voters interests don’t rate that high – even when he needs the votes.)
Hell the more the established elletes attack Palin, the stronger her political chances.
> Carl P
>
>… in other words, if the questions are about the “salt of the earth’s”
> own personal life, then, absolutely, the salt of the earth guy is far,
> far smarter on that subject than any carpetbagger intellectual from
> government or academia trying to tell him what to do…
I’m reminded of Obamas comment thatmore power should be returned to the widse men of Washington.
Dumb is as dumb does. Althouse voted for Il Dufe. ‘Nuff said.
I don’t see any indication that we’re dealing with the problem that gave us McCain in the first place.