AWR Hawkins: Will Palin Run? She Already Is.

And she’s beating Obama and the mainstream media at every turn
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AWR Hawkins, who holds a doctorate in military history from Texas Tech, advises, pay no attention to pundits who go on an on about whether Gov. Palin will run for president:

While I’ve suspected that she was already running for some time, it dawned on me with near certainty after she released her “Thanksgiving Message to All 57 States” last week. Her willingness to mock Obama’s 2008 claim that he’d campaigned in “57 states” proved that she has absolutely no fear of running against him. It also showed that she meant what she said about running against Obama in 2012 when she told Barbara Walters she could beat Obama.

I believe she started running for the office on the first weekend of February 2010, when she stood before the Tea Party convention in Nashville, Tennessee, and asked: “How’s that hope-y, change-y stuff working for you?”(It doesn’t seem a great stretch to reach back to 1980 and juxtapose this with then-candidate Ronald Reagan’s famous question about the Carter years: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”)

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She’s continued to dismantle the assaults of the mainstream media while simultaneously taking Obama to task on point after point.

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America has had over two years to watch Palin speak from the heart, while listening to Obama speak from a teleprompter. They’ve heard her relentless calls for a strong military, while watching Obama try to appease (instead of destroy) terrorists the world over. They’ve heard her defend the free market, while living with the ramifications of Obama’s stimulus package, nationalization of industry, and takeover of health care.

The American people have even seen a microcosm of a Palin-versus-Obama matchup via the 2010 midterm elections in which 30 of 43 of the House candidates she endorsed won, as did 7 of the 12 Senate candidates she supported. Moreover, those elections proved that while rank-and-file citizens largely support Palin’s worldview, they are rejecting Obama’s.

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So while the pundits guess, stabbing blindly into the air in an attempt to come up with proof of whether Palin will or won’t run, the rest of us should just sit back and watch her go, because she’s running for the White House right now.

And if I had to place a bet on who wins in 2012, my money would be on Palin.

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- JP