Palin Panicked media, politicians

Bill Kristol:

I like Sarah Palin (though I don't know her well). I respect her (though I'm aware of some of her limitations). I wish her well (though I'm not convinced she should be the 2012 Republican presidential nominee).

I am convinced, though, that she should have a chance to compete and make her case. In this, I seem to differ from many of my friends in the mainstream media and the Republican establishment. They tend not only to dislike and disdain Palin, they also want to bury her chances now as a presidential possibility. What are they so scared of?

It's silly to claim Palin has no chance to win the nomination or the presidency. The fact is, despite a rough campaign in 2008, Palin has been (for what it's worth at this stage) a co-front-runner in polls of GOP primary voters for 2012, along with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. In a recent Pew survey, she had the strongest favorable-unfavorable numbers of the likely candidates among Republicans.

She has fervent supporters, which would presumably help her in primaries and caucuses. Among the general public, she has a not-great but not-unmanageable 45-44 favorability rating.

Will her poll numbers fall because she has opted to step down early from the Alaska governorship? Perhaps. But the short-term effect of that decision will soon be swamped by judgments people make as they see her out and about, speaking and opining on the issues of the day.

She'll be able to make the case effectively that she should be the nominee, or she won't.

The odds are that she won't -- just as the odds at this point are against any one of the GOP candidates. It's a wide-open race. And Palin may not even run. But the panic among mainstream media commentators and the GOP establishment suggests real worry that if she does, she might pull off an upset. Why else the vehement assertions that she's clearly made a terrible mistake? Why else the categorical insistence that her political career is finished? Aren't they all protesting too much?

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Palin has probably accomplished much more that Barack Obama before he ran for President. She will be running as a conservative in a country where they outnumber liberals two to one. He has a shot if she can capitalize on her charisma with some Bobby Jindal type wonkism.

She seems very realistic about her chances. I do not think her chances would have been improved by continuing in office fighting unending bad faith ethics complaints. The Democrat strategy to derail her with these bad faith complaints was distracting her from her job and costing a fortune. She has cut them off from that strategy and now they are trying other attacks, but the difference is that whe will have the time and resources to fight them better now.