Sarah Palin, Operation Demoralize and Wishful Thinking (Updated)

Hinderaker demonstrates how not to win in 2012
*
Clinical Law Professor William A. Jacobson has a lesson for lawyer John Hinderaker: don't let the DMC's (Democrat/Media Complex's) scare tactics bully you into turning your back on one of the leading potential GOP presidential candidates.

Hinderaker, based on just two dubious polls sponsored by media outlets hostile to Sarah Palin, has folded up his spine and abandoned any pretense of support for Gov. Palin as the next Republican presidential nominee. We say "pretense" because neither Hinderaker nor his fellow legal eagles at Power Line have been among Sarah Palin's staunch supporters. That blog is not included on the roll of Palin-friendly websites at reference site The Book of Sarah because overall, PL has been more unfriendly than friendly to the alpha female of the Grizzly Bears.

Prof. Jacobson schools Hinderaker by simply pointing out that whether the GOP standard bearer for 2012 is Sarah Palin or some other Republican, the treatment of that candidate by the DMC will be the same, i.e. demonization:

You can throw Palin under the bus if you want, but what will you do when the next candidate faces blistering false accusations which drive negatives high after a mainstream media feeding frenzy?

Why not let the political and primary process work itself out. We do not even know if Palin is running, or if she will garner enough Republican support to win.

There is an insatiable mainstream media hunger to demonize and marginalize potential Republican nominees. Feeding that beast in the wake of the Tucson shooting is not the way to win in 2012.

Indeed, Hinderaker has taken the two DMC-sponsored polls at face value, loaded interview questions and all. But in another post, Jacobson calls attention to a third poll, one which which shows Gov. Palin down by 10% among registered voters and only 6% among voters who marked their ballots in 2010. These results are all the more remarkable, given that survey was conducted by Democrat pollsters Greenberg Quinlin Rosner, who have Democracy Corps on their client list, and given the intensive media invective against Gov. Palin both before and after events unfolded in Tuscon. The poll was conducted over the four days following the shootings, and the anti-Palin hysteria began literally just minutes after. As the professor observes:

Considering the beating Palin took in the media during the days in which the poll was being conducted, being down 10% is much better than would have been expected.

In both of his posts, Jacobson advises that Republicans, including conservatives, should let the primary process -- and not the Democrats and their obedient media -- decide who our presidential candidate will be in 2012.

As for us, we've never seen so many weak knees and spineless serpents in our lives as what we have seen not only in the GOP, but among the ranks of those who consider themselves conservatives as well. One would think that someone smart enough to earn a law degree would have enough sense not to fall for the DMC's opening gambit this early in the chess game.

Fortunately, Big Journalism's Mike Metroulas is made of sterner stuff than the three sisters at Power Line. Metroulas, a libertarian whose grad school studies were focused on Intellectual History, sees the DMC meme that Gov. Palin is political toast for what it is: wishful thinking:

As of now, if she wants it, it is hers. Of course, that may change, but a Palin run for the nomination would unleash a grassroots fury of support unseen on the right for a Republican presidential nominee in recent memory, and her detractors know it. Why else would much of the mainstream media be scrambling so often to convince independents that Palin isn’t viable? Plus, many of these people just do not like Palin and what she stands for, which is a pragmatic, principled view of government and fierce American individualism. Mainstream media types generally prefer theorizing about complex strategies and solutions to problems that were most likely created by over-theorizing in the first place. It’s how they were trained in academia and sometimes they just can’t help it. However, life isn’t complicated, and Sarah Palin knows it.

[...]

The core question I’d like answered is this: What is the purpose of this witch hunt if it’s not to rile people up against Sarah Palin? If she’s so damn irrelevant, then this effort can’t be political, can it? Lambasting her on national television, saying she is responsible for murder is inexcusable and it’s personal. Even so, if some whack job did take something Keith Olbermann spat out one night while in one of his hysterical fits and acted on it, Olby would not be culpable. Sarah Palin would agree with this, even if she knew that the person was influenced by Olbermann’s rhetoric. By the standard created for Palin in the Tucson case, Olbermann would be responsible. The problem, of course, is that the standard is completely bogus to begin with, a mere attempt to destroy Palin, with no basis in fact whatsoever. That’s where the “purport” comes into play in Palin’s statement; it’s all a hypocritical, theoretical lie. Did Palin talk about how evil Giffords is? No. Did she call Giffords the “Worst Person in the World” or say she was an accessory to murder? Why didn’t the media go after Chris Matthews or Olbermann or Ed Schultz? Aren’t they pretty abrasive?

Palin’s accusers in this case think rhetoric is powerful enough to influence people and yet there they are, spewing their garbage toward Palin, accusing her of the same thing they would be guilty of–under their own logic–should some loon act out violently toward Palin or any other right winger. If they are so certain that lively rhetoric is dangerous, why are they practicing it themselves? The obvious conclusion must be that they want to incite violence, right? Isn’t that a reasonable conclusion to come to when employing their logic?

Palin’s point was rock solid and her detractors played a silly game of semantics, claiming “She’s done!” along the way, all while discrediting themselves in the process, as Palin so adroitly pointed out.

She done kicked your a__es, boys and girls, all while expressing mainstream American principles that will make her the nominee in 2012, should she decide to run.

There's a scene in the first (Episode IV: A New Hope) Star Wars movie in which Luke Skywalker is curious how his mentor, Obi-wan Kenobi, was able to use his Jedi powers to dupe a Storm Trooper into allowing the two and their robots to pass through a checkpoint. Kenobi explains, "The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded." Like The Force (Dark side, of course) the media's narrative can have a strong influence on those with weak knees.

Update: See John Hinderaker's Weak Defense Of His Palin Political Premortem

- JP