Interesting. I know Sarah Palin is an exciting choice for those ultra-conservatives but I don't think she could win against Barack Obama. She was one of the reasons John McCain did not have a chance in 2008. She still lacks the intellectual capacity to comprehend complex domestic and international issues. This is something that will not change in 2012. I don't really see her as a viable candidate for the mainstream. That is unless the mainstream goes completely insane. Then I might have to think of emigrating to Canada...
There is no chance she wins the Presidency. None. When only 27% of the voting public thinks you're qualified for the job, you have no shot.
ReplyDeleteHowever, she is popular enough within the Republican base to cause a problem. A little under half of all Republican primary voters feel she is qualified. If she decides to run, which I doubt since it requires spending time and spending money, and spending time not making money,I'm inclined to think she could capture enough of the Republican base to force a nominating convention, which would be a mess. (Or, from my point of view, fun).
She is, in many ways, the manifestation of the Republican divide. For decades, the Republican party drove fiscal conservative policies that were to the detriment of the rural and Southern underclass and evangelicals that moderate and wealthy Republicans relied upon to vote them into office using the rhetoric of fear and victimization. What 2008 and the 2010 Tea Party Movement, astroturfed as it was by Freedom Works, showed was that those people, who are mostly old and white, weren't going to take it anymore. And good for them, as delusional as their platform may be, I suppose.
And at this point, if you're strategizing from a Republican perspective, you can throw all the moderates out there you want, you can throw Newt (good luck with that;look at the negatives among voters on him), you can try your luck with a good ol boy like Haley Barbour, or you can try Huckabee, who will get Willie Horton'd by someone who points out that he pardoned a (African American) killer who murdered four police officers.
If it were me, I'd say, let her run, if just to suck the oxygen out of that movement once and for all. It give the Republicans the chance to think long term about how to strategically realign itself beyond its' base of aging and largely white people for 2016. Perhaps by that time, people's memories will have faded enough to make the best candidate the Republicans have appealing: Jeb Bush.
I completely agree. She would lose California (55) Connecticut (7) Delaware (3) DC (3) Illinois (21) Massachusetts (12) Michigan (15?) Minnesota (11?) New York (31) Oregon (7) and Washington (11) which is already down 176. Thrown in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that's another 40. Virginia and Maryland 23. Would she lose Ohio. I would hope so. 20 Hawaii 4, Rhode Island 4. That's 267. Vermont? 3? 270?
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