Well, we’ve had a day to digest the Sarah Palin resignation and her reasons why. Looking through the blogosphere it runs the gamet from her being run from office, to a impending scandal, to preparing for a 2012 run. Mark Steyn believes she was run from office:
So Occam’s Razor leaves us with: Who needs this?
In states far from the national spotlight, politics still attracts normal people. You’re a mayor or a state senator or even the governor, but you lead a normal life. The local media are tough on you, but they know you, they live where you live, they’re tough on the real you, not on some caricature cooked up by a malign alliance of late-night comics who’d never heard of you a week earlier and media grandees supposedly on your own side who pronounce you a “cancer”.
Then suddenly you get the call from Washington. You know it’ll mean Secret Service, and speechwriters, and minders vetting your wardrobe. But nobody said it would mean a mainstream network comedy host doing statutory rape gags about your 14-year old daughter. You’ve got a special-needs kid and a son in Iraq and a daughter who’s given you your first grandchild in less than ideal circumstances. That would be enough for most of us. But the special-needs kid and the daughter and most everyone else you love are a national joke, and the PC enforcers are entirely cool with it.
Most of those who sneer at Sarah Palin have no desire to live her life. But why not try to – what’s the word? – “empathize”? If you like Wasilla and hunting and snowmachining and moose stew and politics, is the last worth giving up everything else in the hopes that one day David Letterman and Maureen Dowd might decide Trig and Bristol and the rest are sufficiently non-risible to enable you to prosper in their world? And, putting aside the odds, would you really like to be the person you’d have to turn into under that scenario?
National office will dwindle down to the unhealthily singleminded (Clinton, Obama), the timeserving emirs of Incumbistan (Biden, McCain) and dynastic heirs (Bush). Our loss.
And his thoughts definitely have merit. But reading her speech yesterday leaves me with a different outlook. I do not have enough information to say that she is going for the 2012 election but I do believe, with what we know now, that she is resigning so she can bring about true change in this country.
Now she can do it unfettered from the constant lawsuits. This part of the speech speaks to both of my points:
Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I’ve been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations – such as holding a fish in a photograph, wearing a jacket with a logo on it, and answering reporters’ questions.
Every one – all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We’ve won! But it hasn’t been cheap – the State has wasted thousands of hours of your time and shelled out some two million of your dollars to respond to “opposition research” – that’s money not going to fund teachers or troopers – or safer roads. And this political absurdity, the “politics of personal destruction” … Todd and I are looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills in order to set the record straight. And what about the people who offer up these silly accusations? It doesn’t cost them a dime so they’re not going to stop draining public resources – spending other peoples’ money in their game.
It’s pretty insane – my staff and I spend most of our day dealing with this instead of progressing our state now. I know I promised no more “politics as usual,” but this isn’t what anyone had in mind for Alaska.
If I have learned one thing: life is about choices!
And one chooses how to react to circumstances. You can choose to engage in things that tear down, or build up. I choose to work very hard on a path for fruitfulness and productivity. I choose not to tear down and waste precious time; but to build up this state and our country, and her industrious, generous, patriotic, free people!
Life is too short to compromise time and resources… it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: “Sit down and shut up”, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and “go with the flow”.
Nah, only dead fish “go with the flow”.
No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time… to BUILD UP.
And there is such a need to BUILD up and FIGHT for our state and our country. I choose to FIGHT for it! And I’ll work hard for others who still believe in free enterprise and smaller government; strong national security for our country and support for our troops; energy independence; and for those who will protect freedom and equality and LIFE… I’ll work for and campaign for those PROUD to be American, and those who are INSPIRED by our ideals and won’t deride them.
I WILL support others who seek to serve, in or out of office, for the RIGHT reasons, and I don’t care what party they’re in or no party at all. Inside Alaska – or Outside Alaska.
But I won’t do it from the Governor’s desk.
There are those throwing the “quitter” label around but those same people never raised the issue of a broken contract with Obama, or from those whiners on my side of the aisle when Dole broke his contract to run for POTUS. MamaPundit hits the ball outta the park with this one:
…we Americans have a short attention span, and the “quitter” label just won’t carry any weight within a year, particularly since Palin is now an iconic figure who transcends any single action she takes.. Given who she is, and the passions she stirs in people, the relatively dull, bureaucratic fact that she decided to leave office early really won’t factor in the grand scheme of the Palin narrative.
Yup, this will be old news but what will still be relative is what Sarah stands for. True conservatism. And that may just mean being outside of the Republican party because we have all seen how wishy-washy our party has become. She confuses the political elite and the bobble heads in our media for the same reason that sets her apart from other politicians. She doesn’t play by the rulebook and she doesn’t need to go hire a PR firm to decide what her next move will be. Does anyone really think this woman gets all nervous about political repercussions? She ran against a sitting governor from her own party for pete’s sake.
She does what she believes is right. One of the biggest reasons why I loved George W. Bush and why I love this woman.
Maybe she isn’t running for President but instead see’s her mission as bringing about real change….not the idiotic utopia that Obama promised but for “free enterprise and smaller government; strong national security for our country and support for our troops; energy independence; and for those who will protect freedom and equality and LIFE.”
Time will tell. She may very well just be sick of politics. Or maybe some big scandal is about to explode.
But I, for one, am not counting her out. Her opponents in elections past learned that lesson the hard way.
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