Douglas MacKinnon: Sarah Palin Speaks the Ultimate Truth

With liberty comes responsibility.
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Douglas MacKinnon, who served in the Reagan and Bush41 administrations, argues in a Townhall.com op-ed that if conservatives allow politicians, professors and journalists to persuade us to settle for the lesser of two evils, we not only betray our ideals, but we advance the left's agenda. If we ignore our common sense, all that remains is leftist nonsense:

If you are a conservative or one who does espouse traditional values, then take a good look around. View the decay of compromise which is rotting our cities, our states, our republic, our educational system, and our entertainment community. As you ascertain that which threatens to implode our very way of life, ask yourself a question: What role, if any, did such compromise play in my electoral decisions?

While still mercilessly vilified by the corrupt and themselves compromised members of the mainstream media, former Governor Sarah Palin continues to do her best to speak a very plain truth. A truth and a wake-up call aimed this time squarely at those who would run in the upcoming Republican primaries for President and those who would vote for those candidates.

During a recent interview with Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel, Governor Palin wisely stressed:

"…in this process of assessing, once the lineup is set and the debates begin…we need to look at every one of these potential candidates and declared candidates records. See if they've had opportunity to veto overspending in their city or their state and some governing body. See if they've seized the opportunity to save other people's money and not squander it. See if they've had opportunity to go to the mat in protecting second amendment rights and every constitutional rights. See if they have in their own personal lives lived a physically and socially conservative life and really walked the walk not just talk the talk…We have to do our homework. Don't let the media define who these candidates are. Let us, as constituents, as voters, as potential candidates…do our homework."

Indeed. Governor Palin has just spoken arguably the most important truth. With liberty comes responsibility. All too often, too many of us are content to let someone else do the "homework" for us and then profess shock when the wheels very predictably fly off and our favorite politician, program, or entitlement ends up in a ditch.

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AS MacKinnon's former boss Ronald Reagan advised those gathered for the 1975 edition of CPAC:

"I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, “We must broaden the base of our party”—when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents.

It was a feeling that there was not a sufficient difference now between the parties that kept a majority of the voters away from the polls. When have we ever advocated a closed-door policy? Who has ever been barred from participating?

Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?

[...]

A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers.

I do not believe I have proposed anything that is contrary to what has been considered Republican principle. It is at the same time the very basis of conservatism. It is time to reassert that principle and raise it to full view. And if there are those who cannot subscribe to these principles, then let them go their way."

That banner President Reagan spoke of has survived the years. It is not tattered and worn from excessive waving, just neglected and forgotten in some circles within Reagan's political party of choice. Too few have been willing and determined to hold it high in recent years. Sarah Palin is one of the few. Though many so-called Republicans would like to drag the standard through the mud, she will not allow that banner to fall.

- JP

Steven Kates: Can Sarah Palin make them listen?

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Dr. Steven Kates, Senior Lecturer in Economics at RMIT University in Melbourne, addresses the questions, not only of whether Sarah Palin will run for the office of President of the United States, but should she run for the job, in an essay in Quadrant, "the leading general intellectual journal of ideas, literature, poetry and historical and political debate published in Australia." Some excerpts:

The question becomes, if Sarah Palin does actually seek the nomination in 2012, whether she is the right one for the job.

Her book is therefore in many respects an outline of her political past. It is a review of many of the decisions she has made as a sampler of the kind of President she would be. It discusses her philosophical position on a number of questions which will be major matters for decision for a President having to deal with the world as it will be in 2013 and beyond.

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That... she has quoted Thomas Sowell gives me a fair idea of where such ideas may have come from. But it is not that she read such concepts in Sowell that matters (if that is indeed what happened) but that when she did come across them, those were the ideas that stuck and remained. Sowell is one of the most articulate conservative intellectuals of our time... That she would find an affinity with Sowell, understand with perfect clarity what he had written and then condense the points so well, is entirely to her credit. She (as well as he) may be wrong. But these are crucially important ideas that, should current policies fail and new ones be required, may make the difference between prolonging recessionary conditions even further and the ability to recover from what began as a relatively mild recession, however much commotion there may have been at the time.

It is that these ideas resonate and make sense to her that matters. Being President is not being the head of a fact-finding commission. It’s not about being the smartest person in the room. The role is to make decisions in real time about issues that have become boiling hot. What you are looking for is someone whose value system, background capacities and general outlook on the world will keep the community safe in a dangerous and unpredictable world. It is to answer these kinds of questions towards which this book has been directed. Sarah Palin’s aim is to demonstrate that she is just the kind of person in whose hands the American public can safely place its trust.

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Will Sarah Palin be President? Will she be the one to “make them listen”? This we will only know sometime in 2012, possibly not until the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November. Maybe we won’t even know until 2016.

More important, however, is should she be President? Is she up to the job (assuming anyone is)? That is a different matter that may never be resolved unless she finally is, and perhaps not even then. In the meantime, Going Rogue is her early manifesto, written to put her back on a pathway towards this undoubted goal. The book has done exactly that and has done it extraordinarily well in spite of the enormous obstacles that have been thrown in her way. She is nobody’s fool, not to be underestimated by anyone.

You can read the full article by Professor Kates here.

h/t: Real World Libertarian

- JP

Sarah Palin and the New Federalism

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The Tenth Amendment clearly states:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

That last amendment of the Bill of Rights is at the center of an issue that resonates with the Tea Party movement, which believes that the states must take back their constitutional rights. As the federal government grows ever larger, it unconstitutionally takes power away from the states that is rightfully theirs:

A number of states have passed resolutions that assert their rights. While the resolutions have no legal teeth, they're intended to carry a message: States' rights are being trampled on.

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37 state legislatures that introduced sovereignty measures in 2009. According to the Tenth Amendment Center, seven state legislatures -- Alaska, Idaho, Louisiana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Tennessee -- have passed such legislation.

All the resolutions, Schwinn noted, are nonbinding and do not carry any legal muscle.

Tennessee and Alaska, in particular, went a step further: The governors in each state, including Sarah Palin of Alaska, signed their respective legislatures' resolutions.

The one-time Republican vice presidential candidate has been a vocal critic of President Obama's economic stimulus plan and tried to reject parts of the money allocated for her state that she deemed unnecessary.

Already in 2010, sovereignty resolutions have been introduced in 17 states. One of the first to move the ball forward this year is Alabama; the legislature voted in late January to approve a state sovereignty resolution.

The Hill's Bernie Quigley observed:

The Reagan period began to open up America to see and experience itself internally, and Goldwater was avatar to that internal development — Emersonian self-reliance — as well. Palin aligns Reagan with the new federalism that the Tea Party movement represents, correctly, as it was Reagan who first returned the idea of states’ rights and state sovereignty to the national political dialogue. She brings these old Jeffersonian features to mainstream conservatism.

In recent years, conservatives have paid little attention to what was one of Reagan's "first principles" -- the New Federalism. In Mitt Romney's widely acclaimed address to CPAC last year, he used the all-too familiar metaphor of a "three-legged stool" to highlight what he and many conservatives consider the most important elements of the conservative philosophy -- national security, fiscal restraint and traditional values. In the blissful afterglow of Gov. Romney's speech, hardly any of the CPAC attendees noticed that there was a leg missing from the stool -- smaller government.

Now Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement, with their emphasis on limiting the federal leviathan and their focus on the Tenth Amendment, have restored New Federalism to its rightful place at the core of conservative thought. Somewhere in heaven, Ronald Reagan must be smiling.

- JP

Could Sarah's book tour be the start of something big?

Erika Bolstad of McClatchy Newspapers writes that Sarah Palin's Going Rogue Book Tour could "jump-start a political movement":

Since she stepped down this summer as Alaska governor, Palin has been cagey about her plans. But with her campaign-style bus and adoring crowds reminiscent of her vice presidential bid, her swing through red zones of bluish states — Indiana, Pennsylvania and Virginia — has appeared to be something more than a book tour.

While it's too early to call it a campaign, Palin's brand of common sense conservatism crackles with the energy of a burgeoning political movement.

In "The Way Forward," the title of the final chapter of her memoir, she says that her persona and her political philosophy are based on common sense that were last espoused by Reagan, her political idol. The role of government, Palin writes, "is not to perfect us, but to protect us."

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The term coined by Palin in her book has been around for a while, said Greg Mueller, a conservative strategist and a veteran of Republican presidential campaigns. Palin, however, seems to have seized on something timely by putting her brand on common sense conservatism, he said.

"If Palin is using it," Mueller said, "there's a very good chance it's going to have resonance in certain communities."

Those communities include a vast network of people who are connected online and unified by the Tea Party protests of the summer, as well as those who've taken up their cause, including FOX News talk show hosts Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

Though McClatchy Newspapers was not firendly to Sarah Palin while she was Alaska's governor (The Anchorage Daily News is a McClatchy outlet), this article is more favorable to her than not. The rest Bolstad'spolitical analysis is here.

Related: Considering the source -- The New York Times, which has been harshly critical of Sarah Palin -- here's another mostly positive article about the former governor and her supporters.

- JP

Continetti: Palin can make a comeback

Matthew Continetti, author of the just-released The Persecution of Sarah Palin, opines in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that former Governor Sarah Palin can make a political comeback if she follows the example of Ronald Reagan and returns to her 2006 playbook:

In Alaska, Ms. Palin didn't run as a culture warrior. She focused on issues with overwhelming public support: ethics reform, a revised oil tax, and more competition and transparency in the effort to build a natural gas pipeline. She took the conservative vote for granted and focused on winning independents and even some Democrats.

The 2006 Palin model looks a lot like the approach that Virginia's next governor, Republican Bob McDonnell, used to win his election last week. It means applying conservative principles to problems like the economy, health care, and out-of-control federal spending. It means addressing voter concern that big government and big business are in cahoots, heaping expensive burdens on small businesses and individual entrepreneurs.

During her book tour, Ms. Palin is sure to mention that the Obama administration's opposition to offshore drilling and domestic nuclear power, and its support for an onerous cap-and-trade scheme, will raise energy prices across the board. But she also might spend less time discussing campaign intrigue and Alaska trivia, and more time outlining how to spur job creation through tax reform.

She might mention, too, that the Democrats' health-care plan would hike taxes, raise the cost of doing business, and lead to rationing down the line. She might point out that, on top of health care, the stimulus and bailouts, President Obama's 2010 budget will further bury the United States in debt. Every time the media try to shift the conversation to personal gossip or past mistakes, Ms. Palin should pull it right back to how the Obama agenda will hurt the middle class.

As Continetti points out, the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate's numbers aren't that great among independents, but but turning them around is doable.  Independents are turning away from Obama and the overreaching Democrats in droves.  Sarah Palin needs to send these voters a reassuring message of common sense Reagan conservatism.  They will respond positively.

Continetti appeared on Fox News thursday night on Hannity:



- JP

Brennan: Palin will rally voters around the GOP banner

Since election day nearly a year ago, the left and its media attack dogs have been pushing a meme which began as a DNC talking point: Sarah Palin is a "divisive" political figure. Not so, says Phil Brennan:

It's apparent to me that Sarah Palin understands the pressing need for a unifying factor that will rally the voters around the Republican banner rather than around individual candidates. And I further believe that she recognizes that she herself is that unifying factor.

After all, it not her personal charm or her beauty, or her outspokenness that attracts large numbers of Americans. It is instead that the American people recognize her as unashamedly one of their number.

She's the woman next door, the one you meet at the grocery counter, an outgoing friendly neighbor whose head is screwed on straight and who views the world around her much in the way we ordinary folks do. It’s called common sense, unfortunately uncommon in the public square.

That, however, is not how the almost universally liberal media sees her.

To them she is a threat that must be faced and eliminated.

Brennan says former Governor Palin's role in the 2010 elections will be a sign of things to come.

- JP

Why independents are tuning out the Left

Independents and some blue-collar moderates are running away from the Democrat Party and the radical Leftists who control it in droves. What is turning them off? Liberals, instead of engaging in substantive debate or constructive criticism, can only insult conservatives, and that's not what independents want to hear.

Here's an example:

I really enjoy a good discussion no matter what the subject and it’s always fun to play devil’s advocate should the opportunity arise. I suppose this is why I listen to people like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and others on the extreme Right. I just wish there were folks like that on the Left which is why I had high hopes for Joy Behar on CNN. When I switched to Behar’s show the topic under discussion was Sarah Palin, which was no big surprise, she seems to be a favorite for discussions on the Left. I was so disappointed when the conversation was exactly what I have come to expect from the Left, just a bunch of insults. I really wish they would twist facts and statistics like their counterparts on the Right to make things more interesting. I heard comments like, “Sarah Palin is just promoting her book which is strange since she has never read a book”, and, “… George Bush who never read a book…”, which is just what I have come to expect from the Left. I was never a fan of George Bush and I’m always happy to debate his presidency and policies. From what I understand of the past President he was actually very well read, perhaps not the greatest speaker, but well read nonetheless which makes these kind of comments just insults and lies. Come on Joy, you can do better, I’m sure of it. Joy Behar really should try and learn more [than] Hannity and Limbaugh, if she did, people like me might actually watch her show once in a while.

While we're not sure where that blogger stands on the political spectrum, we can extrapolate that he or she is not a conservative, since the author considers a rather mainstream conservative such as Hannity (who is a big fan of moderate Rudy Giuliani) to be on the "extreme right." We can therefore reasonably assume that he or she is a moderate or an intellectually honest liberal.

What is telling here is that the Alinskyite tactic of ridicule is a big turn-off for the writer. Just how many others share this person's thinking remains to be seen, but we believe the number is growing rapidly. People are interested in hearing why one side believes its solutions to the problems that they face in this country will work better than what the opposition proposes, not childish insults.

Here is a golden opportunity for Sarah Palin to gain ground with independents and blue-collar moderate Democrats. As the Left continues to insult her -- and you know that they will because they didn't learn this lesson in Ronald Reagan's day -- she will ride above the smears and present an optimistic vision for America which can be realized through the application of common-sense conservative principles.

Please, leftists, don't change a thing that you're doing. You are turning out to be our best recruiters. Thank you for your contribution to our cause.

Update: Richard Cohen proves our point with his insults and lack of substance.

- JP