Palin's potential arc

Reformers historically come to bad ends. They reach a point where they get too many people angry, step on too many toes and overreach. Then the roof falls in on them.

Fortunately for Palin, American reformers have never managed to suffer the fate of Savanorola, who established the pattern back in 1492 and ended up being the guest of honor at his last bonfire, where the good citizens of Florence, instead of burning works of art and cosmetics, burned him.

Is Mrs Palin being allowed to assert her own persona, and develop her own charisms or is she being coached by 'ueber-outsider' Carly Fiorina? As the first CEO hired from outside the ranks at HP, this lady failed abysmally in conserving the essential vitality of the organization while pruning what needed pruning, in other words she pollarded the Silicon Valley legend and grafted on another diseased organism (Compaq) creating an ugly coppice stool. The deeply conflicted board had to fire her to restore life to its stockholders' portfolios (a share of whom are retirees or hope to be have recourse to retirement benefits promised them). If the GOP wants to apply this doctrine, under the leadership of their Victory Chair, woe betide them - Senator McCain deserves better. [In all honesty tho' I must add that Ms Fiorina did admirably well on This Week debating Ms McCaskill: she drove her point home well, that Democrats have taken women's votes for granted for too long and the time is now ripe for change we can believe in!]

Well, the more i hear, the more i like the pattern of "everybody turns in a resignation, no one has a 'right' to a public job" that Palin showed.

Yes, that includes librarians. We need fewer mandarins and arbiters in jobs like that, let alone in public safety supervision -- have you seen the footage of Palin and some schoolkids in the state capital, when the goombah who is fighting his dismissal happens to walk past. Sarah Palin tries to introduce him to the kids, and he looks over his shoulder, gives her a dismissive sneer, and keeps walking without a word. What a tool.

Does the MSM not realize (yes, i'm talking to you Maureen Dowd) that all your sneers and snideness is just affirming Sarah Palin in the eyes of much of the country? Do you actually want to be Pauline Kael, 2008 version?*

*The New Yorker writer who famously said of Nixon, "He couldn't have won the presidential election; no one i know voted for him!"

David Frum had the bloody nerve to call anti-war conservatives "unpatriotic", and he did it four years before he became a U.S. citizen. His analysis of anything means very little to me.

Here are a few other things we know about Sarah Palin:

She lied and continues to lie repeatedly about her opposition to the Bridge to Nowhere.
She left her town of 6,000 with $20 million in debt they did not have when she took office.
She says she is against earmarks but took something like $200 million in pork from the federal government.
She ordered every employee in city government not to talk to the press when she was mayor.
She promised open and transparent government when campaigning for governor and then ordered all of her staff to use their private email accounts for state business so the emails could never be subpoenaed.
She told a reporter on the telephone that "Yeah, I was wrong about that" and the next day accused him of smearing her.
She has now refused to talk to the committee investigating Troopergate after promising she would. The McCain campaign claims the investigation has been tainted by Democrats: there are two Democrats and three Republicans running the investigation.
During her tenure as Mayor, she supported the instituting of a regulation requiring women who were the victims of rape to pay for the rape kit used in their hospital exam and for the exam.
As governor, she fired professionals and hired her cronies; it's said that her high school yearbook is a veritable directory of state government officials; the woman in a prominent post dealing with agricultural listed as one of her credentials for the job a fondness for cows.
She lied about going to Iraq and named Ireland as one of the foreign countries she had visited when the plane was only there for a refueling stop.
She thinks she knows something about foreign policy because you can see Russia from an island off Alaska.
She thought Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were taxpayer-owned corporations BEFORE the federal takeover.
She's unfit to be vice-president, especially behind a 73 year-old man with a recurring potentially fatal disease, whose father died of natural causes at 72.

Frum is a very bright man. But after coming to regret writing for and about President Bush("The Right Man" doesn't sound so great today, does it?), get the sense he slinks off like Carl Spackler fleeing the thunderstruck bishop on the 18th green. This looks like innoculatory plausible deniability. If Mccain/Palin get in and make a mess, Frum can be above the fray, living to write another day with his ominscience intact.Further suspect many of the populist things about Palin are exactly the things that repulse Frum. Note Harvard's best and brightest got us into Vietnam, relative amateurs wrote the Consitution.

This government needs a shock to the system, a regular person coming in with a BS meter and stopping the insanity. That might be a fools' errand or wishful thinking. Also, the culture of "the next great speech" solving everything has to end. Frum is a speechwriter, his interest is obvious. Soaring rhetoric by both sides has gotten us nowhere. Palin appears to be regular person who isn't going to fall victim to that. May be these ideas are wishful thinking by many of us. But to abandon such ideas would be the height of cynicism. And worse-an acknowledgement that our government is basically doomed.

I wonder if the same could be said about Obama, the reformer and agitator for change.

Sure, it's possible. But wouldn't we already have some sense of that by now, after 19 months of campaigning, whether Obama has those tendencies. If there were constituents who believe he abuses power, we'd have heard about it. If he had a habit of secrecy in how he performs his public job, if he had a habit of settling scores, if he had a habit of including Michelle on personnel decisions, if he had a habit of firing political enemies for personal reasons, we'd know about it.

Palin has been subjected to more probing investigation by the media in the past weeks than BHO has had in his entire political career.

Absolutely, and utterly absurd. The conservative press and well-funded conservative commentariat have had 19-months of this campaign, as well as his previous campaign against Alan Keyes. The Clinton machine had 19 months to go after him. The press dissected every moment of Rev. Wright's time at Obama's church, so clearly if there was a story, it would have been found if it came to questions about his leadership and decisionmaking.

Look how much they found in just two weeks on Palin. Look at how many people came forward in two weeks--although a major ethics investigation in her own legislature helped--and look how many questions have been raised. It didn't require much digging; it was already at the surface.

Palin and McCain are learning what life is like in the big leagues. McCain has always been a press darling--except in his own state--and now he's seeing what it's like when he isn't handfeeding reporters. Palin is finding out what it's like to face a press beyond Fairbanks and Anchorage (although many of her problems were documented by the Alaska press and arguably available to the McCain people if they'd bothered vetting her).