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Palin won't be GOP nominee in 2012
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| Parent(s) |
Race
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| Contributor | Monsieur |
| Last Edited | Monsieur Jul 14, 2009 09:53pm |
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| Category | Opinion |
| Author | Bob Shrum |
| News Date | Wednesday, July 15, 2009 03:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Sarah Palin is the bright red thread in the dull grey fabric of the Republican Party. She is charismatic, quirky, melodramatic, and fervently anti-choice, anti-gay, and anti-Obama. But there's one thing she'll never be—the GOP nominee for President in 2012.
Palin has the most intense grassroots base of any potential candidate, in the true-believing core of the party. And that's worth quite a lot. But in Congress and in state houses across the country, Republicans worry that she's unelectable, and could take them down to defeat with her. She says she may campaign for conservative Democrats next year; she'll have plenty of time since a host of Republican hopefuls have announced that they don't want her help.
Why? Her stumbling exit from the Alaska governor's office reinforced an all but indelible impression of incoherence and incompetence. A new CBS poll shows that only 22 percent of Americans say Palin has the capacity to be president. Only 33 percent of Republicans say she does. This is even bleaker than the verdict rendered before the 2008 election, when an anemic 37 percent of voters thought Palin was up to the job. As former Reagan speechmeister Peggy Noonan acidly observed in The Wall Street Journal, Palin makes Republicans look like the "stupid party."
Palin would be stymied by another obstacle. Republicans nominate by primogeniture; they pick the next person in line. So it was with Nixon in 1968, and later Reagan. So it was with both Bushes, and with Bob Dole in between. So it was with John McCain. They were each front-runners who were supposed to get the nod. Despite perilous moments in their primary campaigns—and a virtual collapse in McCain's case—they all eventually did. In presidential politics, Republicans are an orderly party; they're unlikely ever to be comfortable with the spontaneous, erratic performance of Sarah Palin.
They also have a nominee-in-waiting—Mitt Romney. |
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