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Paul R. Hollrah
The Indomitable Sarah Palin
September 15, 2008
Every once in a while we find a tidbit of painful truth emanating from
the lips of a prominent Democrat. Former California Assembly Speaker and
Mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, wrote in a recent San Francisco
Chronicle column, “The Democrats are in trouble. Sarah Palin has totally
changed the dynamics of this campaign... Palin's speech to the
(Republican) National Convention... has set it up so that the
Republicans are now on offense and Democrats are on defense. And
(Democrats) don't do well on defense.”
Liberals, Democrats, and the “drive by” media had already concluded that
they couldn’t lose in November 2008. The election was “in the bag,”
causing Obama, himself, to use the phrase, “When I was a senator.”
Everything... political precedent, the economy, the war, an unpopular
sitting president, and a ho-hum collection of primary contestants... was
against the Republicans.
But now that Governor Sarah Palin has descended on us, energizing
conservatives as they have not been energized since the days of Barry
Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, how will Democrats deal with her? Their
candidate is, by any measure, the most unprepared and least experienced
presidential candidate in history.
Several factors will contribute to the resounding defeat of the
Obama-Biden ticket in November. First, if the McCain-Palin opposition
research team does their job, the Democrats’ argument that Palin lacks
the foreign policy experience to serve as vice president will quickly
evaporate. By making that argument, they not only risk calling attention
to Obama’s tissue-thin resume, they put McCain and Palin in a perfect
position to turn Joe Biden’s presumed strength against him.
Should they challenge Palin on her lack of foreign policy experience,
she can point to any number of Biden’s past foreign policy positions
that have proven to be either wrong or terribly misguided.
For example, Palin could point to a major Biden initiative of 2007. When
Democrats expressed dissatisfaction with the pace of political
reconciliation in Iraq, Biden sponsored a resolution calling on the
United States to impose an ethnic subdivision on the country, dividing
Iraq into Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish regions and requiring Iraqis to
relocate based on their ethnic identification. Biden’s plan was voted on
in the senate and defeated.
Armed with just 10 or 12 such examples, Biden would be no match for
Palin in debate. And when confronted by media superstars playing
“gotcha” politics on behalf of Obama-Biden, Palin could simply cite one
or two such examples, saying, “Yes, it's true. I don't have Senator
Biden's years of experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
but what good are years of experience when your decisions and your
judgment are so often wrong or counterproductive?"
After just one or two such confrontations, the Obama-Biden team and
their friends in the mainstream media would begin looking for a new plan
of attack.
Second, it is important to note that a significant number of Democrats,
mostly lower middle class blue collar workers, regularly lie to
pollsters. They understand that it’s not nice to discriminate on the
basis if skin color so they will tell pollsters what they think they
want to hear. However, in the privacy of the voting booth, they will not
vote for a black man. It is a phenomenon of the Democratic Party’s group
politics that is set to turn around to bite them.
Many pundits, on both sides of the political divide, are now speculating
about the wisdom of Barack Obama’s selection of Joe Biden as his running
mate. They suggest that the only thing that could have saved the Obama
crusade would be an Obama-Clinton ticket.
Nothing could be further from the truth. An Obama-Clinton ticket would
be an even surer loser than Obama-Biden. As matters now stand, Sarah
Palin’s qualifications are more often compared to Obama and Biden’s
qualifications than are John McCain’s. He is often the forgotten man in
that equation. However, had Obama selected Hillary as his running mate
the lines of electability would be even more clearly drawn and voters
would be looking at the race from an entirely different perspective. The
focus would be McCain vs. Obama (male vs. male) and Palin vs. Clinton
(female vs. female).
In that scenario, it is hard to see how either Obama or Clinton could
come out on top. The thinness of Obama’s resume, compared to McCain’s,
would be highlighted, and the Hillary Clinton baggage (Whitewater, Rose
law firm billing records, commodities trading, Filegate, etc. etc.) vs.
Sarah Palin’s record of reform and squeaky clean public service would be
in marked contrast.
And finally, for those who might have some concern about a newcomer to
the national scene being just a heartbeat away from the presidency,
consider this: Second in line to the presidency, just two heartbeats
away is Speaker Nancy Pelosi (assuming that Pelosi is not a bionic
woman, controlled by battery-operated device in the hands of George
Soros), while third in line, just three heartbeats from the presidency,
is Senate President Pro Tem Robert “KKK” Byrd.
As Willie Brown has said of Sarah Palin, “She didn't have to prove she
was ‘of the people.’ She really is the people.” And so she is. She is,
as one writer describes her, “The embodiment of everything the left has
been railing against for decades.”
During the first decade of the twentieth century, The Unsinkable Molly
Brown was the toast of New York. Today, a century later, Sarah Palin is
The Toast of America. Long live The Indomitable Sarah Palin. |
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