NY Sun Editorial: Palin's Point

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Another fine editorial in Sunday's edition of The New York Sun. Excerpts:

President Obama, with his back-to-back statements on the proposed mosque at Ground Zero, has managed to get himself in a position where Sarah Palin has both the high ground and the practical route to progress. At the Iftar dinner at the White House, the president endorsed the constitutional rights of all religions in America to build houses of worship where they want to on private property. He spoke with his trademark eloquence, but he was off the point. So, as he toured the Gulf Coast, he took a powder, explaining that he was not commenting on what he called “the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there.” That was off point, too, enough so that the former Alaska governor finally took to her Facebook page...

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Not only does Mrs. Palin manage, in a polite but firm way, to speak more forthrightly than the president and to draw finer distinctions than the president but she also manages to articulate a practical line more in keeping with a harmonious outcome. That outcome is by no means certain, but the Daily News did report on Friday that the sponsors of the mosque at Ground Zero, Park51, are “not slamming the door” on Governor Paterson’s idea of building the mosque and community center somewhere else.

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Clearly there are a lot of questions to be sorted out in this affair. But one of them turns out to be this: How did one of the most intellectual presidents in history, a constitutional law professor with a government-provided staff of legal experts and policy geniuses and an ability, rarely if ever matched, to speak in lofty tones, manage to get himself in a position where he will end up following the lead of an ex-governor who has been constantly set down by the left as but a one-time beauty queen without brains and who has been watching the whole fracas from a lake-side camp at Alaska?

Read the unabridged editorial here.

h/t: Benyamin Korn

- JP