Posts Tagged ‘2012 primaries’

CBS political correspondent: “Sarah Palin is either running for President or she should be” UPDATE//Chris Wallace chimes in

I see from the comments here and at my Facebook page that some people think I’m only pretending to take Sarah semi-seriously in order to hype advance sales of THE ROGUE.

Listen, folks, I’m not makin’ stuff up.

A photo of Sarah waving from the back of a Harley took up the entire top of the front page of The New York Times “News of the Week in Review” section today.

Also today, CBS political correspondent Jan Crawford posted a piece on the CBS News website under the headline:  “Palin:  Is ‘The Undefeated’ Running for President?”

Crawford’s piece is essentially a rave review of the forthcoming two-hour feature film, “The Undefeated,” produced with his own money by an independently wealthy Palin supporter.

The film, which Crawford has seen, left her with “the distinct impression [Sarah’s] presidential candidacy is not only possible, but inevitable.”

She writes, “Regardless of where you come down [about Palin], here’s one thing both sides should agree on:  it certainly looks like Palin is running for President.”

Go ahead, call Crawford a Kool-Aid drinking right-wing shill.  And remind yourselves again that Sarah is just too stupid, or too greedy, or about to be engulfed by too many scandals to mount a serious campaign for the Republican nomination next year.

But Crawford’s piece was published today by CBS, not C4P.

The bus tour?  The movie?  The move to Arizona?  Can you not hold a finger to the wind and feel the breeze?

As I said to a commenter on my Facebook page, just wishing she’d go away–or pretending she already has–won’t make it so.

UPDATE:

Chris Wallace, who interviewed Sarah on Fox today, later said this:

I’ve interviewed her a bunch of times now over the past two years, and I have never seen her as good, as impressive, I mean she’s always been an entertaining interview, but I have never seen her as good, as specific as she was, whether it was the debt or the state of the economy, or the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. I don’t think any fair minded person could look at that debate and not say that she is potentially a serious candidate for President of the United States. Now that doesn’t mean she’s gonna run, but this is the first time that I looked at her and I thought, she could be real player in a 2012 election.

Sarah Palin and The Seven Dwarfs: Clear-eyed view from across the pond//UPDATE: sending a message?

I often think that Beltway pundits are so close to the screen that they can’t see the picture for the pixels.

And once they reach a collective opinion (i.e. the conventional wisdom from mid-January to April that Sarah’s disastrous plunge into the pool of Narcissus following the Tucson shootings of January 8 had finished her as a force in American politics), they cling to it the way Obama said that embittered poor whites in Appalachia and the Rust Belt “cling to guns or religion.”

Granted, Richard Adams works in The Guardian‘s Washington bureau, which puts him technically inside the Beltway.
Coming from England, however, he’s also a foreign correspondent and thus–unlike the blind men in the Indian fable— able to see the whole elephant.  

In today’s Guardian, Adams points out that there are two strong indicators that Palin will run for president: “everything she says and everything she does.”

Including the fact that her bus tour will take her to New Hampshire this week and to Iowa next month.

You can’t hardly get much more definitive than that.

As Adams writes:

Palin would be crazy not to run for the Republican nomination. Just look at the rest of the field.

 

UPDATE:

Nothing subtle about this:


NY Times Front Page: “Signs Grow That Palin May Run”

Nothing I haven’t been saying all along, but it’s suddenly the new mainstream meme.

Read it here.

Are there still doubters?

More from Andrew Sullivan Soon: UPDATE: He’s Delivered…

He writes today: “I’ve been struggling to write a long new post on this entire thing, and am almost happy with it.”

I can say this about Andrew: he recognized from the start that the combination of Sarah Palin and the bedazzled media’s failure
to expose her for the fraud she was and is represented a genuine and grave threat to democracy. At the time, the 2008 election result was far from certain. In her Christian dominionism, her ignorance, her willfulness, her petulance, her spitefulness and her unbalanced belief that God really had annointed her to impose her narrow view of Christianity on a sinful, secular nation, Palin posed a clear and present danger to our way of life.

And we are by no means out of those woods yet. I have no doubt that she is currently preparing for a Fall Offensive that she thinks will carry her into next year’s primaries on a wave of fresh momentum. Given the weakness of the GOP field (Donald Trump?!!) , she could still become the Republican candidate.

The campaign that would follow that calamity would tear this country apart as maybe nothing has done since the Civil War.

So be grateful that Andrew Sullivan is standing watch.

UPDATE

…and many won’t like what he says.

From the start, Andrew has made an effort to be scrupulously fair about the Trig question. For being willing to consider even the possibility that Sarah’s story was a hoax, he was derided. Today’s post is further evidence of his scrupulousness, and although I disagree with him about many things (he is a Republican, after all) I’ve never found him to argue from false premises.

However, I’m less persuaded than he is by the belated first-person accounts of Quinn and Loy.

Loy wrote the original ADN story that said what a shock it was to learn that Sarah was pregnant, because she never looked it.
Now, three years later, he suddenly remembers that, yeah, actually, she did look pregnant, I just didn’t notice it at the time? A good cross-examiner could have fun with that in a courtroom.

As for Quinn, it was widely rumored that he was romantically involved with Palin aide Ivy Frye while covering Sarah as governor for AP. He doesn’t work for AP any more. I don’t know why, but I’ve heard the story of his relationship with Fry often enough and from enough different people without axes to grind that, at the least, it gives me pause in regard to Quinn’s credibility.

But set aside questions about the motivation of these two, suddnly key “eyewitnesses,” who decided in unison to go public last week. As all cops, prosecutors and defense attorneys know, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. How about eyewitness testimony three years later?

I’m a Trignostic. I don’t have a dog in this fight. But I don’t agree with Sullivan that the “recovered memories” of Loy and Quinn (neither of whom I know, by the way) should be accepted as having significant weight.

Not only is eyewitness testimony unreliable, but these were young male reporters covering the most dazzling & sexy political figure in Alaskan history. Sarah invites them to view her (veiled) belly in private? And now–contradicting what they wrote at the time–they both decide retroactively that she was obviously pregnant?

Something about that smells like fish to me: and not like fish that even Todd Palin could sell commercially.

Sullivan says the Loy and Quinn accounts “buttress–powerfully–the case that this whole thing is a tempest in a spatula.” He finds Loy and Quinn “persuasive.” I don’t.

He’s also persuaded by this conversation that Laura Novak had with a pediatric specialist, who argues that Sarah Palin is not “weird” enough to have fabricated her whole story.

Hmm. I’m not so sure. That reminds me of the argument that friends of Jeffrey MacDonald made in his defense: he couldn’t have murdered his wife and children, because he’s not the kind of man who could have done that. Turns out that he did, and he was. So a long-distance psychological evaluation of Sarah by a pediatric specialist who’s never met her doesn’t rise to the level of evidence either.

My verdict? Jury still out. But we thank Mr. Sullivan for his testimony.