Jack Kelly on the Power of Palin

Her critics have already said every bad thing they could say about her.
*
Pittsburgh Post Gazette columnist Jack Kelly makes a compelling case against the conventional wisdom, which says it may be too late for Sarah Palin to get into the 2012 presidential contest. The conventional wise guys are quick to point out that Gov. Palin has done no fundraising (beyond her leadership PAC, but she can't use those funds for a presidential run), she hasn't built a campaign team, and some of her supporters who believe the media narrative that she will not run are turning to active candidates such as Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.

But the conventional wisdom has a fatal flaw, cautions Kelly. It is "more conventional than wise." Traditionally, candidates have needed to get an early start to build name recognition, and they require a campaign organization mainly to energize supporters to get out and vote. And that's where the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee may have the conventional wisdom beat.

Sarah Palin has some 3.2 million followers on Facebook. That's 800,000 more than all the declared GOP candidates combined, Kelly points out. Palinistas are not the sort of supporters who need to be motivated either to show up at the polls or to stuff envelopes and knock on doors. All Mamma Grizzly has to do is say the word, and they will hit the ground working for her. As recent events in Pella, Iowa have demonstrated, many of them are already doing that.

Also working in Sarah Palin's favor, Kelly observes, are the RNC's new rules, which favor late entrants. He predicts that the highly touted early contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina are more likely to prune a crowded field than to produce a clear front runner. The fewer the candidates in the debates, Kelly argues, the more they will matter. For Sarah Palin, the debates will be crucial.

Because the media/Hollywood left and their fellow travelers in the Vichy wing of the Republican Party have been denigrating her 24/7 for the last three years, Sarah Palin needs to build her poll numbers, especially among independents, which is where the campaign against her has had the most impact. But even that factor can still be turned around:

A new documentary, "The Undefeated," opens with a montage of vicious things celebrities have said about Ms. Palin. Viewers at the premier in Pella, Iowa, Tuesday were shocked.

But efforts to portray Ms. Palin as a shrill, stupid snowbilly backfired on the journalists who sought the release of 24,000 emails from her time as Alaska governor. The emails "brought back the memory of a long-lost Palin: the popular, charismatic competent woman of the people," who "comes across as practical and not doctrinaire," and who is "far from being a knee-jerk partisan," wrote Molly Ball in Politico.

Liberals hope their sliming of her will keep Ms. Palin from running. But it may be the most important reason why she should.

[...]

Many "mainstream" journalists have abandoned all pretense of fairness, but still expect to be treated as if they were honest brokers. Most Republicans oblige them.

Sarah Palin doesn't. She uses social media to bypass news media "gatekeepers." That's one reason so many journalists hate her. They seethe even more because Ms. Palin uses their obsession with her to make them look ridiculous, as she did during her bus vacation in the Northeast last month.

[...]

But her critics have shot their bolt where Sarah Palin is concerned. They've already said every bad thing they could say about her.

"The Undefeated," strives to set the record straight. The people in Pella who saw it liked it very much. But most Americans won't see it.

Which is why debates will be so important if Ms. Palin runs. In them, she'll either conform to the caricature of her -- or demolish it.

[More]

Gov. Palin should do well in the debates. She used a strong debate performance in the 2006 GOP primary and general elections in Alaska to turn the conventional wisdom upside down and win a governor's race the conventional wise guys had said she had little chance of winning. Two years later, she surprised the pundits, as well as Joe Biden, in a vice presidential debate after which a number of observers, including a Frank Luntz focus group, judged her to be the winner.

An email dump in Alaska which showed her to be a good governor and the media to be actively working to try to destroy her, a documentary which drives those points home to all who will see it except for the hard left, an army of grassroots supporters who will -- as Kelly notes -- "crawl over ground glass" for her, new RNC rules which favor candidates willing to bide their time until many of their opponents have severely wounded themselves and their rivals, and a talent to excel in debate settings are all key elements Sarah Palin has working in her favor in this election cycle. All she has to do is say the word, and the game is on. But she has already said that, hasn't she?

h/t: M. Joseph Sheppard

- JP

Jack Kelly: The real Sarah Palin

She's not the snowbilly of media caricature.
*
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Jack Kelly quotes a number of lamestream media journalists who were forced to admit that the Sarah Plain revealed by the last week's massive email release turned out to be a different person entirely from the caricature of her that they themselves had labored so hard to burn into the American psyche for the better part of three long years. Among the usual suspects cited by Kelly is Politico's Molly Ball:

Ms. Ball described her as "the long-lost Palin." But the real Sarah Palin wasn't "lost." The news media hid her. Journalists were too busy scouring her personal life for hints of scandal to report on Ms. Palin's accomplishments in public office.

"When my co-host, Mika Brzezinski and I arrived at the Republican National Convention (in 2008), we were met by excited network chiefs and newspaper reporters who were chasing down a sleazy Internet rumor that Trig Palin was not Palin's child," said MSNBC talk show host Joe Scarborough. "Mika received a number of calls from her friends at the major networks gleefully passing along the Internet lie before cheering for Palin's demise."

Some pundits declare Ms. Palin won't run for president and couldn't win if she did. Is this what they really think? Or is it what they hope Republicans will believe if they say it often enough?

Nonstop criticism has hurt Sarah Palin in the polls. It would be difficult to overcome the false picture painted of her. But the emails, and a forthcoming documentary, are steps in that direction. Furthermore, their now naked -- and increasingly comical -- partisanship has hurt the credibility of her adversaries in journalism.

Back when the reputation of the "mainstream" media was better and its monopoly near total, another conservative derided as stupid and extreme prevailed when he emerged on center stage and dispelled the media caricature of him. Republicans already think Sarah Palin is more like Ronald Reagan than is any other presidential aspirant. If she chooses to run, she may resemble the Gipper in yet another way.

[More]

The left's standard response when anyone makes comparisons between Reagan and Palin is, "She's no Ronald Reagan." But they miss the salient point that she has never claimed to be what elder Reagan son once described as the reincarnation of his dad. Even most die hard Palin supporters don't go that far. Instead, we make the case that she is something much more threatening to the leftist agenda than Reagan's ghost wearing a dress. gov. Palin is a true Reagan believer, one who is dedicated to putting his principles, too long ignored by his own political party, back into practice to save this Republic. That's the real Sarah Palin, and she's as real as Reagan conservatism gets.

- JP

Jack Kelly: Palin up, Obama down

*
Jack Kelly, columnist for both the Toledo Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, remarks on the recent convergence in poll numbers for President Obama and former Governor Sarah Palin:

The turnabout in fortunes is all the more remarkable because no political figure in recent history has been subject to such vilification from our news media as Mrs. Palin. No malicious rumor was too preposterous to report. No accomplishment was important enough to mention.

Meanwhile, no presidential candidate or president has received more favorable press coverage than Mr. Obama.

[...]

That's changing, in both directions.

Kelly cites as evidence positive comments following Sarah Palin's Gridiron Club speech by journalist Dan Thomasson and liberal columnist Clarence Page. He also quotes from a suprisingly favorable review of Going Rogue written by Stanley Fish for the New York Times:

"Perseverance, the ability to absorb defeat without falling into defeatism, is the key to Palin's character," he wrote. "Her political opponents, especially those who dismissed Ronald Reagan before he was elected, should take note."

Read Jack Kelly's column in its entirety here.

- JP

Jack Kelly: The Power of Palin

Jack Kelly wrote his syndicated column on NY-23 before the news broke this weekend that Dede Scozzafava was suspending her campaign. Here are some excerpts:

Political soothsayers will be studying the returns Tuesday from Virginia and New Jersey for omens that could predict the outcome of the midterm elections next year. But the race with the greatest national implications is for the House seat in upstate New York because of what it portends for the relationship between the Washington GOP establishment and an increasingly restive base.

[...]

The Washington GOP establishment quickly lined up behind Ms. Scozzafava. The National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican National Committee have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her behalf.

But the locals haven't been eager to support someone who is clearly a Republican In Name Only. Hence the candidacy of businessman Doug Hoffman, running on the Conservative Party line.

Mr. Hoffman was languishing in third place until he was endorsed by Sarah Palin. That triggered a flood of contributions and a rash of other endorsements.

[...]

The Republican Party may be saved from its "leaders" by the woman they love to hate. The Beltway Brahmins can't stand Sarah Palin because she isn't one of them, doesn't aspire to be one of them, and isn't afraid of them.

If Mr. Hoffman wins, Sarah Palin will deserve the lion's share of the credit. She made her bones in Alaska politics by taking on a smug, corrupt, complacent GOP establishment and beating it.

A larger reform opportunity beckons.

The full Kelly column was published in Saturday's edition of the Toledo Blade.

- JP

Quote of the Day (August 21, 2009)

*
Columnist Jack Kelly:

"Journalists who wrote off Ms. Palin as politically irrelevant after she resigned as Alaska's governor last month spent much of the weekend discussing how she has shifted debate on President Obama's health care reform plan."

- JP