Maclean's Palin cover story is just another hit piece

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As we predicted, the Maclean's cover story on Sarah Palin is a hit piece. When we saw Joel Johannesen's claim that the Maclean's story was "reasonably fairly written," we were skeptical that he had actually seen a pre-publication copy of the article. Now we're convinced that Johannesen was basing his assessment on the title alone. Authored by Michael Petrou, the article is full of distortions and Leftist talking points. The few positives that Petrou gives to Gov. Palin are delivered with the back of his hand.

In just the sixth paragraph, Petrou tosses out this discredited old nugget:

"The gamble didn’t pay off. Sarah Palin arguably sunk whatever slim chance McCain had of winning the 2008 U.S. election."

The highly-regarded and non-partisan Pew Research Center conducted exit polling which disputes the smear. 60 percent of all voters said that Palin's selection was a factor in their vote, but they pulled the lever for McCain by a margin of 56 percent to 43 percent. It was those who said she was not an important factor who voted for Barack Obama by a 64 percent to 33 percent margin.

Jack Kelly offered more compelling evidence on why it was McCain, not Palin, who lost the election:

In a Rasmussen poll taken the day before the election, 71 percent of Republicans said Ms. Palin was the right choice for vice president, but only 65 percent said Mr. McCain was the right choice for president.

When a vice presidential candidate is more popular with the base than than the presidential candidate, it's the presidential candidate who is the problem.

That's why, as Kelly pointed out, Gov. Palin drew much larger crowds than Sen. McCain did when he campaigned alone. She also outperformed McCain with the delivery of her acceptance speech at the GOP Convention, and she performed better in her VP debate against Joe Biden than McCain did in his first two debates with Obama.

The Maclean's attack goes on to snicker at Sarah Palin's Twitter posts, which Petrou  snarks "can read like those of an overexcited teenager who has just discovered what an exclamation mark is." The author quotes liberal Haynes Johnson, who peppers his assessment of Gov. Palin's popularity among conservatives and the Tea Party movement with pejoratives such as "ignorant," "hatred" and "anger." He returns to the list of talking points to offer the advice that the Left never tires of trying to sell to the GOP:

Palin, and the Tea Party movement that has embraced her, risk driving the Republican party too far from the political centre to be electable.

Mr. Petrou's fellow travellers said similar things about Ronald Reagan, and the margin of his victories far surpassed Obama's win. American voters were ready for Reagan's conservatism and his optimism in 1980, just as they will be again after four years of Obama's version of malaise.

Petrou quotes a Clinton flunky now with Brookings who predictably demonizes the tea partiers:

"There are signs that responsible people in the Republican party are a little bit troubled by what’s crawling out from under the rocks that the Tea Party has turned over."

To conclude his hit piece, Petrou leans again on tired old "progressive" Haynes Johnson:

He doesn’t think she’ll win the Republican nomination, much less the presidency. She will shape the party’s politics, however, and, he believes, hurt it. “In the long run, she’s very much a negative. She’s so divisive and she has nothing to offer. She is, really, truly ignorant about issues. It’s breathtaking in many ways,” he says.

Johnson obviously hasn't bothered to read any of Gov. Palin's many Facebook op-eds in which she not only demonstrates that she is well acquainted with a number of important issues, but she also has a rare talent for connecting those issues to the everyday lives of ordinary Americans in ways that they can understand.

This Macleans hit piece is just more of the same from the political Left. If these people truly believed what they say about Sarah Palin, they wouldn't make it public. Were she really the disaster in waiting they claim her to be, they would quietly wait and let it happen. That, after all, would be a great political victory for their side if she is as likely to lose a general election to Obama as they claim. Yet they continue to offer "advice" to Republicans as if they really want to see the GOP succeed, which actually goes against everything they believe. As for those all-important independents, they're too busy running away from the Left to listen to them anymore.

- JP