John Hayward says, Let them take the Palin Test

"Now that we’ve established the Palin Test, let’s apply it to every candidate"
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In a Human Events opinion piece, John Hayward argues that the media's fishing expedition in Alaska has established what he calls the Palin Test. Let’s apply that new standard to all presidential candidates, he proposes, and not just those on the Republican side:

The most spectacular embarrassment in recent media history left the New York Times, the Washington Post, their far-left “partner” organizations, and their army of citizen muck-rakers sitting in a pile of crumpled Sarah Palin emails, with absolutely nothing news-worthy to show for their efforts. They could do no better than saying her correspondence shows she had some interest in the vice-presidential spot before McCain selected her, and she doesn’t much care for the “lamestream media.” Gee, I wonder why?

The UK Guardian summed up its findings as follows: “Tens of thousands of pages of Sarah Palin's emails released on Friday offer an intimate portrait of a politician caught in an almost daily battle on issues ranging from oil exploration to an ethics investigation.” Does anyone think the media dove into the Governor’s correspondence looking to prepare an “intimate portrait” of her “daily battles?”

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Not only is the lack of any scandal in the Palin emails remarkable, but it’s almost astonishing how perfectly her private correspondence matches up with her public pronouncements. She even uses a lot of the same colorful language, like “unflippingbelievable.”

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Well, now that we’ve established the Palin Test, let’s apply it to every candidate, including the incumbent President. Release a couple of years’ worth of email, and let’s see what we find. Do you think it would take an army of volunteer readers very long to find something hypocritical, or even horrifying, in Obama’s correspondence?

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We seriously doubt that few, if any, of the candidates or potential candidates for the 2012 presidential race could stand up to the intense scrutiny and come out of it looking as good as Gov. Palin does right now.

- JP