I took note last Friday of the dishonorable cowards in the McCain campaign who started trashing Sarah Palin before the election had even been held, presumably to try to shift the blame for the loss away from their own performance.It didn’t work. It didn’t work because Gov. Palin made an implausible scapegoat when conservative pundits had been griping in print for weeks about how badly the campaign was being run (with one aspect of that being their mishandling of Gov. Palin). It didn’t work because the conservative base, on the whole, is far more impressed with her than it is with Sen. McCain. Neither of these things should be surprising, as both were eminently predictable.What’s more interesting is the other reason it didn’t work: because other staffers on the campaign wouldn’t stand for it either. Folks like Randy Scheunemann (Sen. McCain’s top foreign-policy advisor), Steve Biegun (who briefed her on foreign policy)—and even the folks believed to be behind the leaks, Nicolle Wallace (a senior campaign advisor) and Steve Schmidt (one of the two heads of the campaign)—as well as longtime Palin staffer Meg Stapleton, a wave of denials has washed away the charges, and left a very positive picture of Gov. Palin behind. Not exactly what they’d hoped to accomplish, I’m sure.

“I’ve been working over 20 years in Washington and I’ve been around literally dozens and dozens of politicians. She is among the smartest, toughest, most capable politicians I’ve ever dealt with,” Scheunemann said. “She has a photographic memory.”————————————Nicolle Wallace, a senior adviser to McCain who helped on the Palin account early on, said Friday on NBC that the governor was “perhaps the most un-diva politician I’ve seen.”Twelve hours before Palin said all she’d ever asked for was a Diet Dr Pepper, Wallace told NBC: “The only thing I’ve seen her ask for is a diet soda.” . . .“Gov. Palin was a breath of fresh air, particularly for those of us who’ve been living in the Washington bubble,” said Tracey Schmitt, the vice presidential nominee’s traveling spokeswoman and a veteran of the RNC and both Bush campaigns. “Because she is a working mom, she brought a real sense of perspective to the campaign trail, which was important.”Schmitt said that Palin’s effort on McCain’s behalf was a dogged one—that she was completely devoted to helping the man who made her famous.“She was tireless on the stump and would have shaken every hand on the rope line if there were time,” Schmitt recalled. “It was evident that this work ethic and enthusiasm was fueled by her sincere commitment to helping Sen. McCain get elected.”Two other McCain aides who were pressed unexpectedly into Palin duty also have only positive things to say about her now.“One of the great developments of this campaign is the addition of Sarah Palin as a powerful and energetic new voice in American public life,” said Taylor Griffin, a McCain press aide who had been focusing on economic issues until he was dispatched to Alaska in late August. “She’s smart, insightful, and has an uncanny ability to ask the right questions.”John Green was McCain’s Capitol Hill liaison for much of the year but was quietly tasked this fall with helping Palin deal with some of her Alaska-related issues, spending significant time there and with her on the campaign trail.“I thought she was an exceptional political person, but more than that an exceptional person,” Green said. “She’s in line with conservative principles and is an everyday Republican—what we’re going to have to find more if we’re going to get back to being a majority party.”————————————In general, according to Beigun, Palin had a steep learning curve on foreign issues, about what you would expect from a governor. But she has “great instincts and great core values,” and is “an instinctive internationalist.” The stories against her are being “fed by an unnamed source who is allowed by the press to make ad hominem attacks on background.” Biegun, who spent dozens and dozens of hours briefing Palin on these issues, is happy to defend her, on the record, under his own name.

Since my first post on Sarah Palin this past June, I’ve had a fair bit to say about her and why she was the best person to run alongside John McCain. Now the campaign is in the rearview mirror, I thought it might be a good idea to go back and see how I did.From my first post, “Sarah Palin for VP”:One, she’s young, just 44; she would balance out Sen. McCain’s age.I think that worked out decently well; it did open the McCain campaign up to the argument that her youth took the “inexperience” argument against Barack Obama off the table, but taken all in all, I don’t think it really had that effect. If anything, trying to make that case hurt the Obama campaign a little, because their attacks on her inexperience rebounded on him. As Ramesh Ponnuru said at the time, “Obama has diminished himself . . . by getting into an Obama vs. Palin contest.” Once he gave up, he did better, because “experience” was never going to be an argument that was going to win this election anyway; and unfortunately, while Sen. McCain had a strong argument to make for himself as the real change agent in this election, an argument which Gov. Palin reinforced, he was curiously reluctant to actually make it.Two, she has proven herself as an able executive and administrator, serving as mayor, head of the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and now as governor; she would balance out Sen. McCain’s legislative experience (though he does have command experience in the Navy).This gave the McCain campaign and others the ability to make a strong argument that Gov. Palin is in fact more experienced and better qualified than Sen. Obama. Had they done a better job of that, it could have intensified their experience argument against him. Unfortunately, the dysfunctional character of the McCain campaign and their seeming inability to put out a strong, coherent message undermined this. In the end, what I think this campaign demonstrated is that while Sen. McCain’s experience advantage meant something in national-security issues, it was in other critical respects meaningless. Those of us who pointed out that Gov. Palin was the only one of the four candidates who had ever run anything, and thus that she had a meaningful edge in executive experience, were right; those who noted that as an implicit criticism of Sen. McCain were also right. I can’t imagine Gov. Palin could do a worse job running a national campaign, certainly.Three, she has strong conservative credentials, both socially (she’s strongly pro-life, politically and personally) and fiscally (as her use of the line-item veto has shown); she would assuage concerns about Sen. McCain’s conservatism.Which would be why she fired up the base the way she has. Check.Four, she’s independent, having risen to power against the Alaska GOP machine, not through it; she’s worked hard against the corruption in both her party and her state’s government. She would reinforce Sen. McCain’s maverick image, which is one of his greatest strengths in this election, but in a more conservative direction.This is why, as even many conservative pundits who were initially skeptical have said, she was “the only choice who could have simultaneously excited the base and strengthened the ticket’s appeal to independent voters.” In the end, the media attacks and the badly mismanaged response to them from the McCain campaign succeeded in blunting her appeal to independents, but her connection with the GOP base remained strong; given a few more years to build her resumé, I think she’s in a good position to rebuild that support among swing voters as well.Five, for the reasons listed above, she’s incredibly popular in Alaska. That might seem a minor factor to some, but it’s indicative of her abilities as a politician.A point which has been referenced in some commentary. Of greater importance is the fact that those abilities have clearly made the transition to the national stage.Six, she has a remarkable personal story, of the sort the media would love.And so they did, when they weren’t desperately trying to find some way to use it to destroy her. But then, as I noted, No one now in American politics can match Sen. McCain’s life story (no, not even Barack Obama), but she comes as close as anyone can (including Sen. Obama); she fits his image.That made her a threat—and a bigger one than I realized. An awful lot of folks in the MSM reacted accordingly.Seven, she would give the McCain campaign the “Wow!” factor it can really use in a vice-presidential nominee. As a young, attractive, tough, successful, independent-minded, appealing female politician, though not well known yet, she would make American voters sit up and take notice.Check, and enough said.Eight, choosing Gov. Palin as his running mate, especially if coupled with actions like giving Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal the keynote slot at the GOP convention, would help the party going forward. The GOP needs to rebuild its bench of plausible strong future presidential candidates, and perhaps the best thing Sen. McCain can do for the party is to help with this.I still believe this, but obviously, the proof is yet in the future.In my post “Sarah Palin hits the bullseye,” I wrote,John McCain leads Barack Obama among women over 40—normally a solidly Democratic voting bloc. To take advantage of this, Dick Morris concludes, McCain should take dead aim at this demographic, perhaps by selecting a female running mate who would appeal to them.
To do that, are there any better options than Alaska’s Sarah Palin? I don’t think so; and as Adam Brickley points out, people are noticing. Gov. Palin for VP.This is hard for me to judge, given the collapse of the campaign as a whole over the last month and a half. Anecdotally, it seems to me that adding Gov. Palin to the ticket did indeed provide the boost the McCain campaign was hoping for, but that the campaign lost at least some of that boost because they couldn’t make a good enough case for Sen. McCain, and he couldn’t make a good enough case for himself.A week later, in a post titled “Sooner or later,” I said this:This is not an election for the conventional approach. That’s one of the reasons why I think Sen. McCain needs to name Gov. Palin as his running mate . . .: if Sen. McCain is going to win, he needs to shake up the conventional wisdom and cross up people’s expectations.The Palin nomination certainly accomplished that. Unfortunately, he couldn’t match that when the economic crisis broke.I called Sen. Obama’s pick of Joe Biden as his running mate “One more argument for Sarah Palin” thusly:Joe Biden on the ticket with Barack Obama is the best argument yet for Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket.accompanied by a list of comparisons and the suggestion, taken from Adam Brickley, that Gov. Palin would be the best person available to debate Sen. Biden. She handled him well, and I do think she did better than anyone else out there would have been likely to do (with the possible exception of Bobby Jindal, who had taken himself out of the running).On the eve of Sen. McCain’s announcement, I wrote this:A great many people across this country—many Republicans, but also more than a few moderate Democrats—are catching the vision of a McCain/Palin ticket, and getting excited about the possibility. This is the reason John McCain needs to name Gov. Palin as his running mate, because you can’t say that about anybody else; the arguments for the other candidates are all purely rational, coldly political parsings of the data. There are equally strong rational arguments, and perhaps stronger, to be made for Gov. Palin, but among them is this: she excites people. None of the other candidates do that, except Mormons for Romney; none of them excite both wings of the Republican base; none of them excite people beyond the Republican base. Only Gov. Palin does that, and I hope Sen. McCain realizes that.He did, and she did. I could wish he and his staff had given her more support, rather than hamstringing her.When the attack on Gov. Palin began, I wrote this:To go one step further, I think the Democrats are making a major mistake here. They’re trying to neutralize her with ridicule as a lightweight, hoping for the quick wipeout right out of the box, instead of treating her seriously; and while that would work if she were a lightweight, she isn’t, and she’s faced worse before. What this means is that, when she comes to the debate with Joe Biden, the expectations for her will be low.and that because of Republican enthusiasm for her, she’s insulated from being Quayled:If she does put her foot in it and give the media the opportunity to label her a lightweight, out of her depth—I’ll be surprised if she does, but even the best of us do it at the worst of times—Republican voters aren’t going to buy the line. Instead, we’ll defend her against it to anyone who will listen, and some people will.On the former, all I can say is that I wasn’t giving her enough credit there; she outperformed my implicit expectations, turning the ridicule back on the Democrats time and time again. For the latter, things played out that way to some extent; every time someone on the left tried to turn something into a “gaffe,” Republicans rose up in all directions to hammer them down. Those efforts still left their mark in the minds of more swing voters than they should have, though, due to the McCain campaign’s efforts to mold Gov. Palin and keep her under control rather than just turning her loose.I also put up a post suggesting that Gov. Palin would be a very difficult target for the Obama campaign, and so she turned out to be; one of Mitt Romney’s strategists went so far as to describe them as “like a lion tiptoeing around a turtle—they don’t know what to do with it.” Unfortunately, the media filled in the gap by beating her up with all sorts of half-truths, invented stories, and interviews edited with malice aforethought, doing everything they could to create a false image to weaken her appeal. The campaign tried to fight this, but they were left playing catch-up; they would, I believe, have done better just to turn Gov. Palin loose to go over the heads of the MSM on every talk radio show and local TV station she could findTaken all in all, though, I think the Palin nomination has to go down as a significant political success; she didn’t put Sen. McCain over the top, but he finished a lot closer than anyone would have expected, and a lot of that is the fact that she energized the base in a way in which he never could have. That freed him up to go after swing voters, and that was working until the economic crisis swung them back into the Obama camp. The appeal she brought to the ticket was fairly easy to see coming, if you could just break out of the conventional wisdom long enough. Credit for that goes to folks like my father-in-law, who got me looking at Gov. Palin to begin with, and Adam Brickley, who kicked the whole thing off nearly 21 months ago. Now that’s foresight.

to be found here, courtesy of Edward Abbey. (I’m not posting the quote here because it isn’t quite pastorly language, which might bother some folks. It’s still good advice for Gov. Palin, though.)

Though there’s much that I admire about John McCain the man, I’ve felt for a long time that his best qualities were all personal, and that (from a conservative point of view, anyway) there was little to say for him as a politician. Unfortunately, his conduct of this campaign only served to reinforce and underscore that judgment—the way money was spent, the persistent division in his campaign (he seemed almost constitutionally unable to operate with a single campaign manager), his poor personnel judgment (Rick Davis should never run another political operation at any level), his inability to put together a consistent, coherent message (much less to stay on message), and the awful decision-making (most notably the mind-boggling decision to pull out of Michigan) all indicate that whatever concerns anyone might have about Barack Obama’s ability to run the Executive Branch, John McCain wouldn’t have done much better.Unfortunately, the fact that he’s now allowing, and perhaps tacitly encouraging, his campaign staff to trash Sarah Palin further reinforces this. As Jennifer Rubin put it,

All of this, I must admit, also reflects on the non-leadership qualities of the former presidential nominee. John McCain was never known as one to resolve conflicts or knock heads. That’s how he wound up bankrupting his own campaign in the primary and then devolving into bitter infighting in the general election. Watching his team engage in vicious, public fighting suggests that perhaps he was never the ideal person for a chief executive role. After all, if the campaign was this bad, imagine what the White House would have been like.

As much as it pains me to say it, though, Rubin doesn’t go far enough. This doesn’t only reflect on Sen. McCain’s leadership qualities—it reflects on his honor. What Nicole Wallace and Steve Schmidt are doing, and what others are doing in propagating lies about Gov. Palin, is dishonorable; that Sen. McCain is allowing this to happen without challenging it is even more dishonorable. He owes it to his running mate to do better.

Taken all in all, I incline to think that John McCain’s loss this past Tuesday will prove a boon to Gov. Palin’s political career. To be sure, the folks who ran the McCain campaign are trying pretty hard to pin his loss on her, as a way of shifting the blame off themselves—but I don’t think anyone’s buying it; indeed, from the reactions I’ve seen so far, the only people they’re hurting are themselves. Throw in the interesting and quite plausible suggestion from Matt Lewis that this isn’t about 2008 at all, but rather is an attempt at a pre-emptive strike for 2012 by a potential competitor, and there just doesn’t seem to be any reason to take these criticisms seriously. As long as Gov. Palin keeps staying above the fray, she should come through unscathed by her ticket’s defeat.That’s a good thing, because a victory might well have done harm to her future career prospects. The odds are pretty good that things are only going to get worse over the next few years, and that the GOP’s current minority will prove to be a blessing in disguise; of course, for that to prove out, change will need to come to the party, but Gov. Palin is now in an unfettered position to help bring that change—which she would not have been as VP. As such, given that her geographical obscurity has been wiped out by two months in the national spotlight and that she now has a deep and strong base of support in the national GOP, she’s in a stronger political position going back to Juneau than she would have had in Washington, D. C.That still leaves the question, what next?At this point, Gov. Palin would have to be regarded as the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, but a lot of things can happen in four years; if she just rests on her laurels, she’ll see others pass her by. She needs to take her position as a leader in (if not formally of) the national party and use it, both to strengthen her own position and to advance the GOP cause. To do this, of course, she needs to keep herself out there as a national politician. The usual way to do this is to run for the Senate, but in her case, that probably isn’t the best option.She could, of course; at this point, it looks like Ted Stevens has won re-election despite his conviction, which almost certainly will mean either his resignation or his expulsion by the Senate to serve his sentence. This will trigger a special election to fill his seat, and Gov. Palin could run—and some people are already urging her to do so. The benefit to that would be that if she runs, she’ll win, which will give her a safe seat through the next presidential election cycle; if she doesn’t, that gives the Left two years to hammer her and try to bring her down before her term as governor is up in 2010. The question is, would this be a good opportunity? Sen. Stevens earned a rock-solid seat by bringing home large quantities of pork, on which the state of Alaska is largely dependent, given how much of the state is owned by the feds. Gov. Palin has done a fair bit in her time in office to reduce that dependence, but there’s a lot more work to do in that regard; for her to run for the Pork King’s seat on a pledge not to seek pork and to keep that pledge could put her in a very difficult political position down the line—and for her to do anything else would ruin her nationally.Alternatively, Gov. Palin could wait until 2010 and challenge Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary; if she did so, however, she would be running for that seat not in order to serve in the Senate, but to run for the Senate simply in order to facilitate a presidential run that would begin shortly after she took her seat would be the worst sort of politics, and it seems hard to believe that Alaskans would go along with it. What’s more, such a tacky move would only damage her standing and reputation.Given that, it seems that Gov. Palin will need to work by other means to keep herself on the national stage. There are several ways by which she can do this. One, as Adam Brickley notes, is to do her job as Governor of Alaska, and in particular to do everything possible to expedite the building of the natural-gas pipeline. This, combined with intelligent national advocacy of drilling in ANWR, will serve to strengthen the country both domestically and in its international position, to strengthen the identification of the national GOP with domestic energy production and energy independence, and also to help her maintain a high national profile as a conservative reformer who gets things done.Another thought Adam had, which hadn’t occurred to me, would be for Gov. Palin to establish a PAC and do fundraising for national Republican candidates for 2010. By doing this, she could give the congressional GOP a real boost two years from now, as well as building support and loyalty among other leaders in the party. Even better, along with sending them money, she could spend time campaigning for Republican candidates across the country, using her own formidable political skills directly to boost their chances. Given that she will be a marked woman for the national Democratic Party in 2010, it might even be better for her not to seek re-election, but to take the time she would need to spend campaigning for herself and invest it instead in other Republican candidates (including, of course, Sean Parnell or whoever would be the GOP candidate to replace her in Juneau). Of course, if she did so, she would need to find another job, but I’ll come back to that in a minute.Before addressing that point, it should also be said that Gov. Palin would do well to work to win over conservative skeptics like Charles Krauthammer, Kathleen Parker, George Will, David Brooks, and Christopher Buckley—not because their opinions are particularly important, but because impressing those who ought to be her supporters and currently aren’t is the most direct way to establish herself as the true standard-bearer of the Republican Party. The best way to do this is to address the current lack of a strong conservative identity in the national party, strengthening it and bringing it back to its roots, and to do so in a way which also dispells the easy caricature of her as an intellectual lightweight. Therefore, as one who framed the troubling challenge presented by Iran with the question “what would Reagan do?” I would suggest (as would Jim Geraghty) that Gov. Palin should ask herself the same question, and do what Gov. Reagan did in the 1970s:

Reagan . . . [spent] years in the 1970s mulling the great issues of the day, reading voraciously, and presenting detailed commentaries on everything from the SALT and Law of the Sea treaties to revultions in Sub-Saharan Africa to the future of Medicare. Then and only then, finally, after 16 years on the national stage, did the GOP give Ronald Reagan its nomination and present him as its candidate for the presidency.

Obviously, she’s still going to have her day job, at least through 2010; but in and around that, and raising her kids, I believe Gov. Palin should devote as much time as she can to studying and writing on the great issues of our own day. Keep building her governing experience dealing with the challenges of Juneau—and as much as possible, take advantage of that to use Alaska as a “laboratory of democracy” on issues like health care—but engage intellectually as well with the challenges of Iran and Pakistan, Social Security and judicial philosophy, the future of NATO and how to deal with a resurgent Russia, practical approaches to changing the system in D.C., and what our stance ought to be toward China. Co-author pieces with leading conservative intellectuals—maybe an article on judicial nominations with Antonin Scalia, to throw out one wild idea. Help rebuild the conservative intellectual treasury that was squandered by the GOP during its time in power. And off these articles (and perhaps books), I’d like to see her give speeches under the auspices of the Hoover Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Foundation, the Institute for Religion and Public Life, and other such organizations. If she does decide not to seek re-election at the end of her term, she could go to work for an organization like AEI, or perhaps in the national party leadership structure, and use that as a platform to continue developing and arguing for her conservative agenda.In short, I believe Gov. Palin should keep her name out there, not just by doing political things (though she should certainly continue as she has begun in Alaska), but by using both her position and her gifts to articulate, develop and defend conservative political philosophy and its applications. In so doing, if over the next four years voters become accustomed to seeing her name and picture appear along with insightful, well-argued, thought-provoking pieces in places like The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, conservative opinion magazines such as National Review, the Weekly Standard, and The American Spectator, websites like RealClearPolitics, and perhaps even on occasion in the MSM if they allow it—including, on topics which make it possible, illustrations from her own achievements in Alaska—then she’ll maintain her public profile but in a way that gives the lie to those who’ve tried to dismiss her; and along the way, she’ll reinvigorate American conservatism in much the same way as Ronald Reagan did, and help the GOP along in the necessary task of taking stock and getting back to being the party it needs to be. Two birds, one stone—and an entirely fitting task for one who would be her party’s leader, to start by leading it back to its soul.