Instapundit » Blog Archive » WILL JOHN MCCAIN need Sarah Palin to save him in Arizona?
J.D. Hayworth is polling well against him, and would likely enjoy Tea Party support in the primary . . .
If Palin endorses McCain over Hayworth, she will immediately forfeit all her credibility with the emerging GOP conservative majority, as well as exposing herself as just another go-along to get-along establishment pol.
Allahpundit (Insty cite) thinks the only obstacle to a Palin endorsement is that McCain is too proud to ask for one. I think Allah is out of his freaking mind.
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A tricky situation for Sarah. Best bet is probably to keep quiet and endorse nobody.
Really? How about if she just abides by her own principles and endorses Hayworth?
Actually, though, I’m not sure I know just what her principles are. She supported a “path to citizenship,” and did not support anything involving the return of the 12 million illegal aliens living here illegally to their home countries.
That’s too close to the McCain Scamnesty for my taste, so maybe she should endorse him after all.
Almost all of my inclination to support Palin comes from the fact that I hate the people who hate her. I haven’t really spent much time trying to figure out whether I actually like her. It seems like she has a few supporters here; can one of you make the positive case for her, rather than point out how hopeless her enemies are?
Well, it’s not quite as cut and dried. You pretty much have to throw out most of her campaign crap with McCain, because no way would she be allowed to digress from the McCain campaign platform.
Before McCain, she didn’t do a lot of commenting on the big national issues.
I plan on reading her book and following her speeches to see how it plays out over the next several months, so I can get a solid handle on what she is about today. A fair amount of her earlier state level history does have a decent conservative-libertarian tinge to it, though.
I’m certainly not a so-con, but I can live with her brand of it. Beyond that, here’s Wikipedia’s rundown of her positions (keeping in mind that Wiki’s lefty tendencies don’t make it a natural supporter):
Sarah Palin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I don’t see a whole lot of reasons not to support her here, and quite a few reasons I might want to vote for her.
Thanks Bill; I agree, there’s no reason in that list to oppose her, and plenty to like. In past election cycles, it would have been enough for me to support her; but this cycle I am much more focused on economic issues than social ones.
I guess I’d better start paying more attention to her.
Palin just seems unafraid to use common sense. She is not perfect by any means. I do believe she prefers to do what she believes is right rather than politically expedient. That’s worth a lot in my calculation.
Bill Q:
She would still be governing a remote and nationally unimportant state except for John McCain giving her a hand up. I believe she is a decent person and, as such, she would have a hard time biting that hand.
The basic decency she exudes is what first attracted me to her and that was long before she became VP candidate. She has amazingly solid character which is what drives leftists nuts over her.
Uh, sorry, but so what? McCain “gave her a hand up,” and then trashed her. She’s supposed to kiss his ass and compromise her own principles just because he tried to use her to win his own election?
You may like her if she does endorse McCain. Me? (And a lot of other folks, I suspect). Not so much. I won’t be respecting, trusting, or voting for her if she does.
In fact, that whole “giving her a hand up” is egregious bullshit. He didn’t pluck her out to help her. He picked her to help himself, and he did so with ruthlessness aforethought, and dumped her when he found her usefulness exhausted. She doesn’t owe him shit, and if she thinks she does, then she is as big a moron as her detractors say she is.
McCain personally himself trashed her? I must have missed that; I had only seen smears from McCain’s campaign staff. Do you have a link?
If that is the case, then I agree that she should endorse McCain’s opponent.
Split hairs much? He did nothing to rein in his staff, and nothing to support Palin while they were trashing her. But that’s McCain all over. Have minions do the dirty work. while professing to be above the battle.
You can’t be that naive.
I guess I am somewhat naive. I had thought the smears were from former staff no longer under McCain’s direction. But you’re right, he could/should have defended her; I hadn’t thought that through. This would lower my opinion of McCain except it can’t go any lower than zero.
Anyway, Sarah Palin is the first political figure on the national scene in a very long time to exhibit real character, well-founded principles and unblinking courage — since R. Reagan I think.
She is a private so-con but a public libertarian which matches my personal approach.
Exactly. That’s why I said I can deal with her social conservatism. You know the old joke? “If you oppose abortion, don’t have one.”
She wouldn’t have one. But she wouldn’t prevent another woman from having one.
Et cetera.
I would like to address this, though, Dean. The size of the staff for a prexy campaign is much, much larger than that for a Senator, even one with as swelled a head as McDick. Most of them no longer work for him because they can’t.
That doesn’t mean that almost all of those people are not still heavily wired into McCains “political network,” for lack of a better name.
They do his bidding. If he had told them to knock it off - or not start in the first place - they would have obeyed him, or risked being marked as ungrateful or insubordinate to the next politician (maybe McCain himself) who needed their services in the future. That he didn’t do so, and further made no effort to defend Palin, in fact, ostentatiously did not defend her, is telling.
And what it tells me is that Palin is under no obligation to support McCain at all. I think she understands this perfectly well, by the way she fired back at his staff who attacked her in Going Rogue
. I believe those salvos may have appeared to have been aimed at them, but were in fact focused on a much larger target.
IIRC the staff started smearing her during the campaign. And McStain did nothing.
I must admit naiveté about how campaigns and staffing work and the aftermaths that continue to tie staffers to the candidate even after the elections.
I bow to none in my disdain for Obama and his aims but I still believe Obama’s win last year was better for the nation than his losing to McCain would have been. It provides the best chance in several decades for a conservative comeback. And it is happening even faster than I anticipated.
It’s happening so fast that a new worry is emerging. The Democrats are alienating themselves so thoroughly and so quickly from common Americans that the GOP might be able to win in 2010 simply for not having ‘D’ after the name. This might result in more RINO’s. Maybe I’m being overly pessimistic here.
I’d say that in politics one can never be pessimistic enough.
She could un-endorse McCain by recounting her positions on the issues and where Hayworth and McCain stand on them. That would be enough, I think, to indicate what she’d do if circumstances were better.
I still have to pick up my jaw every time I see or hear some jackass telling someone that the elected, successful governor of Alaska could possibly be as ignorant and unprepared for power as the unAmerican who never learned our history while responding to the Muslim prayer call in Indonesia 5 times a day, and then came back to be mentally molested by a Communist in Hawaii. I’ve never heard of anyone as unprepared and undereducated as Obama is, nor as hate-filled against the United States, with the possible exception of the people he just ordered his AG to take the blame for putting on trial in federal court in NYC last week, that gutless anorexic.