Monday, October 27, 2008

Sarah Palin Redux, Re-Redux, and Re-Re-Redux

When Sarah Palin first appeared, my comment was:
"Whatever you think of Palin, she's likely to remain on our national scene for another three decades. That's a very long time. She'll fill in the experience gap. Her following, already fervid, will only grow. And she may one day be our Margaret Thatcher."
It would be naive to doubt that sometime soon Palin will be capable of delivering polished talking points on all the many issues about which she's currently gut ignorant. Sarah-Palin-as-ignoramus will be a distant memory. She'll never gain nuanced, supple faculties of comprehension, but she'll have a ready sound bite for just about everything. And that's all that's required of our national figureheads since GW Bush shattered the glass ceiling for smug yahoos.

So the question is: how viable a national politician would Palin be at that point?

The new conventional wisdom among the left, which even made it into
next week's Newsweek, is that Palin is so reflexively divisive and extreme that she could never win broad support. No matter how much she energizes her "base", she'd never attract centrists - the undecided voters who call elections in our evenly polarized country.

But I'm old enough to remember when the same was said of Ronald Reagan. 

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