Sarah Palin lays her burdens down

We have to hand it to WaPo political columnist/blogger Chris Cillizza. He called it correctly a little over a month ago when he said that Sarah Palin shouldn't run for reelection as Alaska's governor.

Cillizza can be forgiven for engaging in a little "told you so" in Mondays "The Fix":

Several weeks before Palin resigned, the Fix made the case for why she shouldn't run for reelection in 2010. The key points from the post are excerpted below:

-- Geography is destiny. From a logistical point of view, being from Alaska is a huge hurdle for Palin's national ambitions. The state is four hours behind East Coast time and takes the better part of a day to travel to or from. That means that Palin, if she is committed to running for reelection, can't simply pop into Iowa or New Hampshire for the day.

-- Not a good time to be governor: While every politician in the country wanted to be a governor earlier this decade (budget surpluses, a chance to innovate), the political landscape has shifted as the economy has collapsed. Governors face serious political peril as a result -- with voters almost certain to be unhappy about the measures that their chief executives will need to take to close budget gaps. Palin is not immune; she drew heavy criticism for instituting a hiring freeze for the state government in January.

-- Building a machine: Palin has begun -- in fits and starts -- to build a national political apparatus of the sort required to run for president. But she has met with trouble at nearly every corner, with miscommunication between her team in Alaska and her team in Washington. The best way to win over the GOP's smart set is to make a few savvy hires for her political action committee. The only way for Palin to do that is to spend more time in Washington, not only hiring smart operatives but also just chatting with neutral GOP strategists about how she should be positioning herself and what she can do to remake her image.

Those are all good points and are just some of the burdens of the governor's office that Sarah Palin has laid down. Here are a few more:

-- A state GOP which embraces her with only one arm: The other is busy trying to stab her in the back at every opportunity. Sarah Palin's crusade against corruption in Alaska turned some powerful state Republicans against her. Not the least of these is former Governor Frank Murkowski, who still has many supporters in the legislature and the party apparatus who have caused Palin no end of problems. Members of her own party in the legislature often vote with the Democrats to make her job of governor as miserable an experience as they manage. For their part, the Democrats lost what warm feelings they may have had for Sarahcuda when she campaigned in the 2008 election against their Chosen One as John McCain's pit bull with lipstick.

-- A hostile press: The state's largest newspaper, The Anchorage Daily News, is a McClatchy newspaper, which means it has very liberal editorial slant which bleeds over into its reporting of news. The ADN endorsed Barack Obama in the 2008 election. Alaska's smaller newspapers, with the exception of her home town paper, The Frontiersman, have not been overly friendly to her either.

-- Bloggers against Palin: What Dennis Zaki proudly calls a "community of bloggers" (organized network of left-wing nutroots bloggers) in Alaska cranks out the hate for Sarah Palin on a non-stop basis. They created the lie that the FBI was investigating her, which a spokesman for the bureau in Alaska recently denied. They publicize each ethics investigation filed against her, some of which are filed by some of these bloggers themselves. National nutroots websites such as the Daily Kos and Huffington Post pick up and amplify these blog posts, and they move on up the chain to liberal legacy media outlets like MSNBC. There are also bloggers on the right which keep up a constant barrage of negative posting on Palin. One is run by radio talk show host Dan Fagan and another by Andrew Halcro, who lost in the race for governor to Palin when he ran as an independent.

-- A legion of complainers: A circle of Palin opponents determined to take her down are using a variation of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, by which they overload the state government with frivolous ethics complaints and freedom of information requests. Alaska's ethics laws don not provide the same protections for governors as it does for legislators. If you file a complaint against a state legislator, for example, you are prevented by penalty of law from publicizing it. No such restriction covers governor's, however, and the bloggers against Palin make sure that each ethics complaint their allied file gets reported not only on nutroots blogs, but in the legacy media across the country as well.

It makes sense for Sarah Palin not only to eschew a second term, but to resign and get the heck out of Alaska. Many Alaskans don't realize how good a governor they have in Sarah Palin. They should compare notes with Californians and New Yorkers, who would gladly trade governors with them in a heartbeat. Compared to most of the other 49 states, Alaska is in great shape, due in no small measure to the stewardship of Sarah Palin. Frankly, she's a much better governor than the state deserves. She's not letting Alaska down by resigning her office. Alaskans of good character have let her down by not putting a stop to the insane and wasteful ethics complaints and by allowing the Palin-hating minority in their state drown out their voices.

Update: Larry Kudlow agrees.

- JP