OK. So Sarah Palin is ambitious (we knew that) and thinks that she might be able to parlay her short time on the national stage into a run for the Presidency in four or eight years. What does she face if she tries that? Let’s look at her positive and negative characteristics as a national candidate for office.
1. She has her strong ambition, her good looks and her good health.
2. She has the skills that helped her achieve success in a beauty pageant. Those are some formidable political skills. They include poise, a gift of gab and an ability to read and please a crowd. She's not afraid of the media, although she avoids the better media hounds.
3. She is also a well-respected member of the Christian fundamentalist crowd, so she has a built-in base of fervent supporters.
4. She has a track record of political success in Alaska. Being elected Governor is no small feat. However, Alaska is a small sandbox to work in. That and the age and corruption of the existing powers in Alaska allowed her to use the advantages she brought to the game to win the governorship. Whether she can keep it will be another issue.
5. Going forward, she has the fantastic publicity that McCain gave her by bringing her in as his Veep candidate. This will be a mixed bag.
On the other side it has become quite clear that Mrs. Palin has several negatives which we can see.
1. She has no innate interest in either actually governing or in learning in general. Her general ignorance is quite obvious. Her intolerance and impatience is also rather clear. She does not appear to separate the job she has as Governor from her own personal wants and desires, nor does she understand much about how government works. She offers her personality for election, not her ability to govern. The general awareness of this is part of the negative side of the publicity she has received.
2. She has been exposed in Alaska as not beyond attack. It looks like she has not gotten along well with either the legislature or with the Republican Party in Alaska. This is going to be a big fight for her, beginning when the Alaska legislature reconvenes. Whatever the outcome, she runs for reelection in two years. Without any real knowledge of Alaska politics, I'd bet that her potential opponents are heavily mining the last two months for ammunition to attack her and finding a great deal.
3. Her base of support is the Christian conservatives. That support, taken together with her being relatively unknown, probably were critical in electing her governor. That being an unknown is now gone. Her national exposure will be at best a mixed blessing.
4. Nationally the Christian conservatives are becoming less interested in political activities. They have not gotten much back for all the political effort they have expended in the last three decades and the Reagan era Christian Coalition leaders are gone. Even with Palin on the ticket, they didn't do a lot for McCain.
5. If she goes national, she no longer has the small sandbox to operate in. She will have a lot of competition even for the Christian conservatives, starting with Huckabee.
6. Insiders from the McCain campaign have already shown they are ready to torpedo any effort Palin makes to run nationally. Any attempt to run for President will draw a great deal of opposition inside the Republican Party.
So it appears that Sarah Palin has gotten a great deal of national attention, both good and bad. She is going to take that back to Alaska where she has the upcoming legislature to deal with, her investigation for misuse of her office when she fired the Security Director for what appear to be personal reasons, and then she has to run for reelection before the next Presidential cycle. Each of these situations presents her with a minefield to traverse, although the misuse of her office may just be more a problem for her image than a threat to her has governor.
Assuming that she lasts and gets reelected governor, she is in the same position that Bush was in 1998, except that her potential base is the Christian Social Conservatives rather than the financial conservatives who supported Bush. Even if she did get the Christian Conservatives to support her in the national arena, they could not nominate Huckabee in the 2008 Republican primaries, and Huckabee is clearly a more capable leader than Sarah Palin is. The Republicans who worked in the McCain campaign have already demonstrated opposition to her. It is very unlikely that the Republican Party would ever nominate her for President.
But even if the Republicans were to nominate Palin for President, what issues does she run on? McCain just ran a campaign without offering any solutions for serious issues, and he lost. Palin has only her personality and her social conservatism to offer. Her personality is not all favorable, in spite of her ability to charm some selected audiences. It is almost impossible to imagine the American voters electing her President.
It’s obvious that Sarah Palin has the ambition to run for President in 2012 or 2016, but with her lack of preparation for governing and the torturous path she will have to negotiate between now and then it is extremely unlikely that she is going to make it back to the national stage any time soon. But she believes in miracles. That will keep her hopes up. The odds against her success are extremely high.
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