In an abrupt move that made her look less like a viable presidential candidate and more like the GOP’s version of Michael Jackson – without the talent – Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced yesterday that she’s quitting her job with 18 months left to serve, calling it another step back from “politics as usual.”
That’s for sure.
Surrounded by her family and standing lakeside at their home in Wasilla – where as the mayor of tiny-town she added one of the few entries on her political resume – Palin began, as was expected, with an announcement that she would not seek reelection at the end of her first term as governor.
Sarah Palin
(There was no mention of an ongoing investigation into Palin’s gubernatorial ethics.) Then she pulled the pin and let fly with her grenade, adding that she won’t even complete that first term and will hand over governance of Alaska to Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell on July 26.
Cryptic though it was, Palin’s decision was widely interpreted as prefatory to a presidential candidacy in 2012.
In her rambling, gambling address – which seemed to have been fueled by an overdose of Red Bull – Palin compared herself to a basketball point guard driving through the “full-court press” of the Obama administration; recovered when she nearly forgot to bring God into the picture; shoehorned in a nod to the brave men and women who continue to die in George Bush’s war; and said she had no intention of serving out her term as a lame duck, having all the “fun” that other such political fowl seem to enjoy.
The usual apologists for a tattered Republican Party responded with the usual boilerplate comments, including party chief Michael Steele.
“She is an important and galvanizing voice in the Republican Party,” he said, without specifying that her galvanizing effect doesn’t reach much beyond the fringe right. “I am certain this has been a difficult decision for her to step down as Alaska’s governor. She has been a good governor for her state and I wish her and the Palin family the best during this transition.”
William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and a Palin stalwart, was quoted by The New York Times as saying the conservative bombshell’s bombshell could be a wily move.
“Everybody I’ve talked to thinks it’s a little crazy,” he said. “But maybe not. What is she going to accomplish in the next year as governor? Every time she left the state she got criticized for neglecting her duties.” Certainly quitting her job a year and a half early won’t reinforce that notion.
But other Republican voices said if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, then it is a duck – in this case, not only lame, but bizarre.
“Today’s move falls further into the weirdness category; people don’t like a quitter,” John Weaver – former senior strategist for Sen. John McCain’s self-destructive 2008 presidential bid, with running mate Palin – said in the Times.
The New York Post got this from an unnamed Republican “party pro”:
“If you aspire to the highest office in the land, then suddenly think your lieutenant governor can do a better job – not exactly a profile in courage. She has an incredibly thin resume, a serious lack of gravitas, no coherent philosophy and the people around her are amateurs. She’s finished.”
And the dean of Republican political consultants, Ed Rollins, was typically blunt in his assessment.
“It wasn’t smart under any circumstances,” he said on Sirius radio. “It wasn’t set up properly. I don’t know what her reasons are. But if her reasons were, ‘I’m gonna run for president and I need two years, three years to do that,’ it was very foolish.
“You don’t call a press conference and raise questions. You call a press conference to answer questions. She has basically left out there everyone asking, why is she doing this? There must be another reason. There must be another shoe that’s gonna drop. There’s something else.
“It makes her look flaky, which is one of the dilemmas she’s had to face all the way through this.”
Coming before the toxic fallout has settled around the confessed extramarital sex-play of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and Nevada Sen. John Ensign – whose expected presidential candidacies died in the flames of passion – Palin’s newest misadventure would seem to bolster a repeat White House bid by Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. He is staying busy setting up residence from Michigan to the East Coast and back to the West Coast – with a stop in Utah – as he tries to broaden his own political base.
Palin, whose folksy, carefully scripted address to the 2008 Republican National Convention endeared her both to the conservative fringe and to a tabloid press eager for fresh meat, clearly has some explaining to do.
She’ll have the chance, after signing a book deal with Harper Collins in May to tell her story. The payday has been estimated at $7 million to $11 million. There’s an easy roll-of-the-dice analogy in that. Too easy. Just like trying to draw another line between the GOP’s “pit bull in lipstick” and the late Peter Pan in lipstick, Michael Jackson.
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