George Will caught way off base

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George Will has been a Sarah Palin critic from the moment she stepped onto the national stage. Just days after John McCain selected the then-governor of Alaska to be his running mate, Will dismissed her in the first of what would be a series of his anti-Palin screeds:

"So, Sarah Palin. The man who would be the oldest to embark on a first presidential term has chosen as his possible successor a person of negligible experience."

Only in the elitist mind are ten years of local government executive experience and three years of the same at the state level (including a year as chair of an oil and gas commission) somehow "negligible."

In his latest attack on Gov. Palin, Will declares that the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate:

"...is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states."

Will's evidence? He argues that a Palin run for the White House would be like Barry Goldwater's ill-fated 1964 presidential campaign. But by attempting to put Goldwater and Palin into the same box, Will's argument reveals itself to be constructed of pine needles. As M Joseph Sheppard points out, the electoral landscape of today doesn't even remotely resemble that of 46 years ago:

In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was basking in the glow of a martyred president, the country was prosperous, the Congress, with Johnson's deft handling based on years of experience in the Senate as Majority Leader, was instituting the large spending of the "Great Society" and America's prestige in the world was unquestioned, especially after Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis.

No Republican candidate-left, right or centrist, could have come anywhere near defeating Johnson. The fact that Goldwater won six states (5 from the deep south plus his own Arizona) is in fact a remarkable achievement. In similar races against a hugely popular incumbent McGovern and Mondale were slaughtered.

Where Will goes off the track is not only disregarding the historic context of presidential popularity but also the shifting forces of historic political identity in the south. The deep south was a democratic party stronghold from the reconstruction era to 1948 when the first cracks appeared. These initial movements were to States Rights candidates (Thurmond and Byrd) who won a majority of electoral votes in a number of states (four states for Thurmond in 1948 and two for Byrd in 1960). The shift of the south to the Republican party commenced in earnest with Goldwater in 1964 with his five state win (matched by Wallace as an independent in 1968)

Since Goldwater's run in 1964 the south has seen a majority of states go Republican in every subsequent election- not exempting Obama's huge electoral vote pile in 2008 (including southerner Clinton's two runs) except for Carter's sweep of the south in 1976,

Thus to think that a Palin (or any Republican candidate for that matter) would not do at least as well as McCain did in the south and border states in 2012 when every factor that Johnson had going for him is, to this date, not mirrored or applicable in respect of Obama's presidency, is utterly ridiculous and not worthy of someone of Mr. Will's experience.

Joshuapundit notes these same differences and says that George Will just doesn't get Sarah Palin:

Normally, one would have expected her to fade away like most losing ex-running mates into respectable anonymity and most people scarcely remember their names a year later.

Yet in Sarah Palin, we have someone who has shown the ninja political skills to transcend this and become arguably the most watched and famous political figure in the entire country. And she did it her way, outside of the GOP establishment.

That should give an astute observer a clue that we're not simply talking about some semi-literate chillbilly with a pretty face and a few nifty slogans.

Although when she does adopt a slogan, notice how well she uses the language - death panels for instance, a phrase that [perfectly] defined the contempt for human life and Orwellian nature of of ObamaCare and stuck to the debate like superglue.

And as for the bit about her seeking friendly audiences...Will remains trapped in the mindset of the Old Media he is so much a part of. After what she observed first hand on the campaign trail ( and even afterwards ) she was astute enough to realize that most of Will's Left-bent, Obama worshiping colleagues were never going to give her or any other conservative candidate anything like a fair hearing - so she's bypassed them entirely and is concentrating on solidifying her base and winning over the swing votes by going to them directly.

That's what her op-eds, FaceBook page,the appearance on Oprah and "Going Rogue" are all about. If I were her, I'd do it exactly the same way and let the polls take care of themselves. Two years is an eternity in politics.

As Joshuapundit points out, Sarah Palin has already had "the equivalent of a nuclear war launched against her and her family," yet she's not only still standing, but running at the front of the pack.

Will should stick to writing about baseball. In his latest political outing, he managed to get himself caught by two sharp bloggers in a rundown between the bases.

See also: Mike Potemra's post at NRO's The Corner:

"The gravamen of [Will's] substantive objection to Palin... is that while she has 'showed grit . . . she has also showed that grit is no substitute for seasoning.' The thing about seasoning, though, is that it can come with time. I have seen already that Palin is a political natural, so I have little doubt she has the raw political talents to win people’s affections: In this regard, she reminds me of no one so much as of Bill Clinton, who in the 1992 primaries managed to turn catastrophe into political gold. He, too, used every attack against him as an opportunity to make the central political story entirely about himself, and emerged as a result as a highly sympathetic person in the eyes of middle America — sympathetic enough to defeat an incumbent president who not long before had enjoyed a 91 percent approval rating."

- JP