Speculation that Sarah Palin will run for president is like candy to the media. And Palin likes it that way. But I don’t think she’ll run, and here’s the reason why.
Before President Barack Obama could address a Washington, D.C., swelled with revelers and in-the-moment seekers, the pandemonium of the day, he faced much smaller crowds in Iowa, places with more ponderous settings. As a correspondent for my family’s newspaper, The Daily Times Herald, I saw a lot of this campaign close-up.
Twice during his successful Iowa caucuses run President Barack Obama appeared in my hometown of Carroll, once at the Carroll Recreation Center just after Labor Day 2007, and a second time the day after Christmas that year at Carroll High School as the early January caucuses loomed.
His campaign went to smaller towns. Obama hit Denison early in the Iowa effort and Audubon on the Saturday after Thanksgiving – the latter a late-night appearance capping off a marathon day of campaigning. Michelle Obama spoke at Crossroads Bistro the Sunday before the Iowa caucuses.
Obama was in this part of Iowa so often that, shortly before the Iowa caucuses, The Washington Post noted that our newspaper, The Daily Times Herald, “has a level of access to Sen. Barack Obama that any major media reporter would covet.” We interviewed the would-be president six times.
Carroll County voted for Obama in the Iowa caucuses and then again in November, making the town one of the more western pockets of support in Iowa for the Illinois Democrat. After supporting President George W. Bush in the last two elections, Carroll County went to Obama in November 51% to 47% — or 5,284 to 4,905. That was only slightly under the 54% Obama won in all of Iowa.
That’s what it takes to win the Iowa caucuses. A similar effort is needed to win the New Hampshire primaries. Try not giving the local papers multiple interviews and see what happens to your poll ratings. Try going around Iowa day after day after day for a year or more without answering the people’s questions or giving them thoughtful and responsive ideas to solve their problems. Try substituting all the chicken dinners with county chairmen with tweets and neologistic Facebook updates. Try blowing off all the debates because you can’t handle the heat.
Does anyone seriously think that Palin would work that hard? Or that she could get away with running an Angle/Paul media campaign, where she holds press conferences but doesn’t answer any questions, or she refuses to speak to the bigfoot reporters from the network news and the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post? Do you think she’d do 19 debates, like Obama and Clinton did? Even if she did, do you think she’d still be viable after the first two were over?
Once you start thinking about what it takes, there is no way to envision Sarah Palin running a successful presidential campaign.
Not against a veteran like Mitt Romney, anyway, and not against the best campaigner the world has ever seen, Barack Obama. Maybe she could do well in a Super Tuesday-type event, where none of the candidates can embrace all the power brokers and the people, but she’d have to get to that point.
If she doesn’t know it already, once someone sits her down and explains what her schedule would be like and what she’d be expected to do, she’ll take a pass. Even she isn’t stupid enough to think she’s up to it.
she won’t run. It would be a pay cut. seriously.
She can have much more power, money and influence NOT being president, at least for now. Part of that is because of the power the nut job media will give her now, part is because of the way scary accountability actually holding office would hold, and part is because she might ALWAYS have an opportunity to run for prez. What’s the rush?
All true. But there’s a more fundamental reason she won’t run, and that’s because she doesn’t have skill set or work ethic to do it.
She has to run by ’16 at the latest. But if she doesn’t run in ’12, then what excuse does the TradMed have for covering for her after that. Besides, the GILF fantasies grow stale after a while. It’s not like she’s Raquel Welch or Elle MacPherson.
What would be funny is if she either didn’t run or didn’t win in the primaries and then someone nominated her to cabinet position in an effort to win over her supporters and keep her from yapping. The hearings would be priceless.
But, but, but, even if she did run and win, we’d only have to endure her for 2 years. On to the next shiny thing. /snark
I’ve still got her down as running for 2012, despite the serious impediments Boo mentions.
She and her campaign might attempt a Nixon ’68 campaign — severely limit, but not completely shut out, press interviews, while elsewhere carefully stage managing plenty of town hall events.
Study up a bit in the next year (up to the limits of her well-known limited attention span and ability). Then limit debate availability — though here she’ll have to show up at enough to avoid making a huge story out of her avoidance. Keep expectations ridiculously low — such as her team did, fairly well, pre-VP debate with Joe. (Of course, a compliant media helped there too.)
Go Reagan on her opponents: come prepped with plenty of one-liners, and a few put-downs of the flip-flopping front-runner or Obama, and meanwhile show just enough substance (she’s learned, say, a few stats about the debt or Social Security, or the last names of the presidents of Afghanistan or Mexico) to make people think they’ve miscalculated her intelligence, as happened with Reagan. Meanwhile, put the Palin charm (with or w/o the winking) fully on display for the folks.
Ya never know. Knucklehead lazy frat boy George Dubya made it all the way through the primaries into the WH and didn’t know SS was a federal program. Palin isn’t quite as steeped in politics as Junior was, but on the substance, they’re comparably ignorant, and look at how one wiggled through.
I dunno, all those examples can be distinguished from Palin in a lot of ways. Nixon was a political genius who worked his ass off for years preparing for 1968. Palin is… not a political genius, to put it mildly. Reagan looked like a Rhodes Scholar in comparison of his policy knowledge to Palin’s. And most of the public liked Reagan, even if not all of them agreed with him. Whereas lots and lots of people REALLY don’t like Palin. And Dubya is the greatest (or rather, worst) legacy hire of all time, whereas Palin comes from Nowheresville, AK.
I’ll add that Palin, unlike Nixon, also appears to have zero work ethic.
I only mentioned Nixon to show how a campaign has successfully been run in modern times with very limited campaign press avail, plus — I forgot to mention — absolutely no debates (not that Nixon was shabby at debating, though he sweated a lot). Ailes ran the show, and the largely shut-out press barely raised an objection.
Reagan I see as more similar in most ways to Palin — largely charming personality- and simple soundbyte-driven candidacies, with the pol having a shaky grasp on the substance. Though recall that by 1980, Reagan already had one tough primary campaign for prez under his belt (narrow loss to Ford), a brief convention run before that (68) plus two full terms as gov of the biggest state, as opposed to one half-term of a tiny state. So by 1980 he was going to be a little more up on the substance, just by osmosis, than he otherwise would have been.
Plus there are ways for even lazy or short-attention span (Palin) types to bone up. With Reagan, even as president, his aides learned to keep memos to one page, preferably 2/3 of a page. Even better, on newer or more complicated subject areas, they would make a video presentation of 30-60 minutes. Reagan much preferred this method of absorbing material (accd’g to Richard Reeves’ book on Ronnie).
Not saying Palin could win a general, just that she’s a major contenda for the Gooper nom this cycle. Frankly, I think she knows she’s hot politically now, but might not be in 5 years, when — after a “decent interval” of people forgetting about Junior — probably another Bush is going to end up crawling out from under the rock, to be called upon to rescue the party once again.
loathed Nixon,but you could never say that Nixon wouldn’t do the work.
Nixon was born paranoid and serious. by the time he became Vice-President, he’d had a career in Washington.
don’t insult Nixon by comparing Palin to him.
lawd, Palin has brought me to the point where I’d say something positive about Richard Nixon.
My, you’re awfully sensitive about Dick Nixon. Are you sure you’re not a Gooper?
Once again, my comparison had nothing to do with each pol’s work ethic — that’s your straw man.
The comparison dealt with Nixon’s extraordinary closed-off 68 campaign, as I clearly wrote, and how team Palin might seek to duplicate it, in more modern form of course, allowing for a few (but not many) debates (Nixon, as I wrote, debated no one in 68, iirc; but that had nothing to do with the “work ethic” you keep harping on).
I would say though that Nixon ran a sanitized, roped-off campaign in 68 that was insulting to the American people. Is that permitted?
I don’t think so. I think the impediments I mentioned are totally insurmountable.
She would be crushed in the Iowa caucuses and that’s her constituency, not New Hampshire. She’d be absolutely routed in Iowa after offending every county chair, every newspaper editor, and taking a non-stop Sharron Anglesque beating by the local and national television coverage.
Hell, I hope she does run her stupid Facebook campaign. Romney will destroy her.
Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. I’m only making arguments to back my hunch that she’s running, then how she could plausibly carry it out. I actually think it’s far more likely that she could win the nom than win the general against an incumbent Obama (providing we’re not in major economic meltdown).
Palin could benefit from Romney and Pawlenty splitting the mod-conservative vote, plus whatever among IA Goopers there exists of serious anti-Mormon attitude.
NH would favor Romney obviously, though it can be quirky. But SC is advantage Palin, and winning big there — a state Repubs must have in the fall — would look very good as she moves forward.
In 1980 I though the much smarter and substantive Poppy Bush, after his IA win and long family ties to the NH area, would finish off the sorta stumbling Reagan there — but it didn’t happen. Similar surprises might be ahead in the 2012 early rounds.
You really should stop comparing Ronald Reagan to Sarah Palin.
???
Not exactly sure why I shouldn’t. Is it because doing so tends to elevate her? Bad luck for our side to do so because RR ended up winning?
I have low opinions of RR, as I thought I indicated above, just as I do with SP. But I would never underestimate her appeal, even if (currently) a majority do not find her palatable, and I find it much better from a partisan (Dem) political pov not to merely dismiss a potential from the other side, but to fully explore the matter.
It’s not 1968 anymore. With our 24/7 news cycle and all the other media outlets, no one could get away with what Nixon did in 1968.
And she can “study up” all she wants. She does not have the intellectual capacity to retain anything, and when she puts it in that Mixmaster of a brain it never comes out sounding like anything that makes sense.
I think she will have worn out her welcome long before 2012, except for a few die-hard (and braindead) devotees, which anyone in the public eye seems to accumulate. (You’d be surprised at how many people are still on Mel Gibson’s bandwagon!)
And let’s remember that frat boy Bush II made it through the primaries as a Republican, and was put into office by the Supreme Court, not the American people.
Iowans will not vote for presidential candidates who won’t stand in their living rooms and answer questions from everyone, even if everyone is only ten people. Her skin isn’t nearly thick enough to do an entire presidential. She needs adoration, not smart, persistent questions from farmers, small business people and professors. Palin is getting ready to replace Oprah when she retires.
I agree with all that’s been said and would add that Republican primary candidates get pummeled by each other, in debates and in ads. One way or another, they’d force her to engage. I’ll bet the sole reason Newt is talking about running is just to get a chance to shred her to pieces.
I actually think that she will run, and that she’ll win the nomination. Not in spite of, but because of the impediments you mention.
You’ve written several times about the growing rift between the tea party fringe and the establishment conservatives, and how the lunatics truly are starting to run the asylum.
My thought is that, barring an actual Obama implosion, the establishment conservatives are going to see that beating Obama in 2012 is an impossibility. They’ll then cede the nomination to Palin knowing it will expose the insanity of that wing of the party.
After she gets annihilated, they will attempt to assert control, selling the same snake oil they always do: “Hey, look, we’re with you ideologically, but you guys are just too direct! Hang with us, we know Washington, and we’ll set the gears in motion to accomplish all those things that we’ve promised for years but never really got around to. Trust us!”
IF that all happens, it will be interesting to see if that wing of the party falls back into subservience or if they split off. My guess is the former, solely based on history and their daddy-complex.
If no work went into it, she’d run and she might win the nomination. But she has to win a primary or caucus at the front-end of the process, and there is no way she can do that. It’s not that Iowan Republicans aren’t sympathetic to her message, but she would offend the hell out of them during the process.
She might try, but she will fail in majestic fashion.
I don’t know man. Logically I hear what you’re saying, but I still just can’t get past the feeling that she’s going to be the sacrificial lamb that puts the ‘grown ups’ back in charge of that party in the long run.
And it’s not like they won’t have the foot soldiers to try to pull it off. If Iowa doesn’t go well, it didn’t exactly kill McCain in 2008 after he got stomped by Huckabee (and almost everyone else).
I go over to the Daily Dish where Sullivan is getting an ulcer thinking about Palin winning the nomination.
here are my thoughts:
the thing I appreciate most about Iowa and New Hampshire is that, in order to win those states, you must do the legwork. you must be willing to put in the hard work.
and, she is one lazy and stupid woman.
You have to think like she does. She runs as Vice President again with someone who has an edge in the Party, helps them get elected, then hires someone to knock them off. Voilà! President Palin!