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Guns Guns Guns
Guest
After three years of tweeting, hinting and eyelash-batting, on Wednesday Sarah Palin announced that she was not running for president. Her Facebook friends are disappointed. But the announcement was long expected, old news.
In 2008, John McCain dumbfounded the nation when he selected Palin as his running mate. She was so obviously unqualified that even Dick Cheney said McCain had made a "reckless" choice; a judgment Palin quickly validated when she told Charles Gibson that she was qualified to speak authoritatively about foreign policy because the Eskimos who live on Little Diomede Island can see Russia.
Today, people forget how close McCain's what-do-I-have-to-lose attempt to revive his flagging presidential campaign came to working. Putting Palin on the ticket instantaneously energized the God and gun base of the Republican Party that McCain had failed to rouse.
We'll never know for sure, but if the economy had not imploded four weeks before the election, that might have been enough.
Think about it.
But for Lady Luck, quirky doxy that she is, Palin — who in a recent television appearance on Fox News seemingly confused Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain with long-dead San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen — might have been a septuagenarian's heartbeat away from the presidency.
After the 2008 election Palin returned to her day job as Alaska's governor. In January 2009, in her annual state of the state speech, Gov. Palin reassured Alaskans that "when I took my oath of office to serve as your governor, I swore to steadfastly and doggedly guard the interests of this great state like a grizzly with cubs, as a mother naturally guards her own."
Then, six months later at a news conference on the lawn behind her house in Wasilla, Mother Grizzly announced she was abandoning her cubs by quitting. Palin's explanation that day of why she no longer wanted to be governor was incomprehensible. Something about not wanting the state she loved to have a lame-duck chief executive, which, until she quit, it didn't have.
So why did Palin really quit? Levi Johnston, the Wasilla homeboy impregnator of Bristol Palin, who thanks to her appearance on "Dancing with the Stars" is now almost as famous for being famous as Paris Hilton is, lived for a while with the Palins after the 2008 election.
In his book, Johnston remembered what he thought after Palin's news conference: "I wasn't surprised. I hate this job, she used to say. I could be making money instead."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mitchell-palin-20111009,0,5458013.story
In 2008, John McCain dumbfounded the nation when he selected Palin as his running mate. She was so obviously unqualified that even Dick Cheney said McCain had made a "reckless" choice; a judgment Palin quickly validated when she told Charles Gibson that she was qualified to speak authoritatively about foreign policy because the Eskimos who live on Little Diomede Island can see Russia.
Today, people forget how close McCain's what-do-I-have-to-lose attempt to revive his flagging presidential campaign came to working. Putting Palin on the ticket instantaneously energized the God and gun base of the Republican Party that McCain had failed to rouse.
We'll never know for sure, but if the economy had not imploded four weeks before the election, that might have been enough.
Think about it.
But for Lady Luck, quirky doxy that she is, Palin — who in a recent television appearance on Fox News seemingly confused Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain with long-dead San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen — might have been a septuagenarian's heartbeat away from the presidency.
After the 2008 election Palin returned to her day job as Alaska's governor. In January 2009, in her annual state of the state speech, Gov. Palin reassured Alaskans that "when I took my oath of office to serve as your governor, I swore to steadfastly and doggedly guard the interests of this great state like a grizzly with cubs, as a mother naturally guards her own."
Then, six months later at a news conference on the lawn behind her house in Wasilla, Mother Grizzly announced she was abandoning her cubs by quitting. Palin's explanation that day of why she no longer wanted to be governor was incomprehensible. Something about not wanting the state she loved to have a lame-duck chief executive, which, until she quit, it didn't have.
So why did Palin really quit? Levi Johnston, the Wasilla homeboy impregnator of Bristol Palin, who thanks to her appearance on "Dancing with the Stars" is now almost as famous for being famous as Paris Hilton is, lived for a while with the Palins after the 2008 election.
In his book, Johnston remembered what he thought after Palin's news conference: "I wasn't surprised. I hate this job, she used to say. I could be making money instead."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mitchell-palin-20111009,0,5458013.story