2012: President Palin?

We’ve all been thinking about it. With Sarah Palin as the Vice Presidential nominee and (hopefully) the Vice President of the United States in 2008, it would only be a matter of time before Governor Palin herself was on the top of the ticket.

“Palin for President 2012″ is a blog that says it is starting a movement to elect Sarah Palin the President in 2012. There’s not much on the website or blog yet but I will be closely monitoring the site. Any friend of Sarah Palin’s is a friend of ours. Sign me up!

You can find their blog here, and if you know any other websites/groups/blogs that want to elect Palin the President in 2012, leave a comment and I’ll add them to the blogroll at right on the page P4A: Palin 2012.

Sarah Palin vs. Hillary Clinton: the True Battle?

The New York Times has an interesting hypothesis: that the true battle this fall could very well be Sarah Palin vs. Hillary Clinton. 

This raises an interesting question for Hillary Clinton. Does she want to work very hard to elect Barack Obama? On the chance (however slight) that he doesn’t make a complete disaster out of his presidency, Hillary will be another 4 years away from running for President. But on the other hand, if Obama utterly fails and ends up damaging the nation even more, Hillary will be one of the people who put him there. There’s only so much that saying “I told you so” can help.

But to make matters more complicated for her ambitions, if Hillary doesn’t break her back to elect Obama and he loses, the far-leftists who make up Obama’s base won’t lift a finger to elect her in 2012. It’s a very interesting conondrum in an election where white working women (or “Wal-Mart moms” as Democrats condescendingly refer to them) could swing certain battleground states. 

But the true danger, I think, is Barack Obama running against Sarah Palin. The reasons for this are twofold: because it raises Governor Palin to an even higher level; and because more people find Sarah Palin favorable than find Obama or McCain or Biden favorable. The more people learn about Sarah Palin, the more they seem to like her (unless they’re liberals). If he tries to go after her, even if she goes after him, it will backfire–we’ve seen this already in the past week. I could go on for days about how people only find Governor Palin’s attacks on Obama’s smug self-worship to reaffirm their distaste for his antics, but that’s for another post. The long and short of it is that the usual tricks aren’t going to work against Governor Palin. 

But can Obama trust the Clintons to try to move against her, given the way he threw Hillary under the bus?

Nominating a Pair of Breasts?

Why Governor Palin?

If the answer to the above question is because she’s a woman, congratulations: you’re wrong.

Sarah Palin’s sex is incidental in this case. It’s wonderful to have a woman on the Republican ticket for the first time ever, of course, but anyone who thinks John McCain will pick a Vice Presidential candidate based on the presence of a uterus doesn’t know anything about John McCain or politics in general.

Palin is smart choice (and not just because she has more executive experience than the entire Obama/Biden ticket combined). A lot has been made of her being McCain’s second choice, but all of that is irrelevant because she was his last choice and the right choice.

On the matter of experience, who else was there? Romney, who exchanged blows with McCain during the primaries? Pawlenty, who’s a good governor but is as unknown as Palin and lacks the polish and flair that Palin has? Huckabee, who also slapped McCain around pretty well during the primary? No, certainly not.

Furthermore, for those Republicans (like myself) who have watched the Bush administration descend into the scandal-ridden corpse of its former self, Sarah Palin brings her no-nonsense, non-partisan anti-corruption credentials to the ticket. Whether the pervasive feeling that the Bush administration has done a lot of illegal things is justified or not (and that’s a matter for another day), to nominate Governor Palin to be Vice President shows that John McCain is making the most out of the fact that he wasn’t hand-picked by the gOP establishment. Palin has experience going after her own party when corruption is present, and that’s the most important part of her experience.

The prevailing wisdom (if you can call the talking points of the likes of Barbara Boxer and Barack Obama wisdom) that Palin is a pair of breasts to balance the ticket is not only insulting to the Governor, but also to all women. They’re saying that women can’t do valuable things, can’t be working professionals, can’t be excellent candidates for high national office; they’re just there to look pretty. This just goes to show that NOW represents women in the same way Jesse Jackson represents blacks.

All in all, Palin is an electrifying choice. Her gender adds to her already massive appeal and ensures that, no matter who wins, the United States takes an embarrassingly overdue step forward. And even if Barack Obama wins, Governor Palin will continue her meteoric rise–assuming Obama doesn’t get the country destroyed by February 2009.