Category Archives: Sarah Palin

Links on Obamacare

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“Essential Reading” Department:

David Goldhill, “How American Health Care Killed My Father”
Yes, it’s 10,000 words. It’s also the most important thing you’re likely to read about the state of our health care system. I’ll be posting on this article in some detail when I have the time.

John Schwenkler, “Maybe the Best Thing I’ve Read on Health Care Reform”
Consider this the SparkNotes/CliffNotes version of Goldhill’s article.

Sally Pipes, “Top Ten Myths of American Health Care”
Good debunking of the current CW. Warning: it’s a PDF.

Megan McArdle, “Why I Oppose National Health Care”
“Once we’ve got a comprehensive national health care plan, what are the government’s incentives? I think they’re bad, for the same reason the TSA is bad. I’m afraid that instead of Security Theater, we’ll get Health Care Theater, where the government goes to elaborate lengths to convince us that we’re getting the best possible health care, without actually providing it.”

 

“Where Did You Get Your Medical Degree” Department:

Scott Gottlieb, “Obama and the Practice of Medicine”
Are bureaucrats really more qualified than doctors to make these decisions?

 

“Can’t Anybody Here Play this Game?” Department:

Caroline Baum: “Obama Goes Postal, Lands in Dead-Letter Office”
So comparing the “public option” to the Postal Service is supposed to make us like the idea?

Jay Cost: “Obama Misread His Mandate”
One of our few great political analysts says the administration doesn’t have the mandate it seems to think it has . . .

Dorothy Rabinowitz: “Obama’s Tone-Deaf Health Campaign”
. . . but the ineptitude of its salesmanship so far isn’t helping its case any, either.

 

“Sarah Palin Was Right” Department:

Mark Steyn: “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death Panels”
“Government ‘panels’ making ‘rulings’ over your body: Acceptance of that concept is what counts.”

Andy McCarthy: The right interpretive framework
“Raising these issues hit the right notes: they gave people a prism for understanding the big picture of Obamacare.”

Thomas Sowell: Whose Medical Decisions?
Daniel Terrapin summarized this one nicely: “Call it what you like, ‘death panels’ will be the end result.”

Mark Steyn: You’ve Had a Good Innings
“Ultimately, government health care represents the nationalization of your body.”

Pundette: “Sen. Diaz doesn’t like euthanasia vibes he gets from House bill”
Just a reminder that Gov. Palin didn’t make this up.

Dispatches from the health-care front

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As the ABC News website tells the story (HT: C4P commenter William Collins),

The news from Barbara Wagner’s doctor was bad, but the rejection letter from her insurance company was crushing.

The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay.

What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50.

“It was horrible,” Wagner told ABCNews.com. “I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won’t give you the medication to live.”

Barbara Wagner is not alone in this experience.

“It’s been tough,” said her daughter, Susie May, who burst into tears while talking to ABCNews.com. “I was the first person my mom called when she got the letter,” said May, 42. “While I was telling her, ‘Mom, it will be ok,’ I was crying, but trying to stay brave for her.”

“I’ve talked to so many people who have gone through the same problems with the Oregon Health Plan,” she said.

Indeed, Randy Stroup, a 53-year-old Dexter resident with terminal prostate cancer, learned recently that his doctor’s request for the drug mitoxantrone had been rejected. The treatment, while not a cure, could ease Stroup’s pain and extend his life by six months.

“What is six months of life worth?” he asked in a report in the Eugene Register-Guard. “To me it’s worth a lot. This is my life they’re playing with.”

The thing is, though, to the state of Oregon, six months of these people’s lives isn’t worth much of anything—and it’s the state of Oregon that’s paying the bills. The inevitable result of this, asSarah Palin has been pointing out, is that a dollar value is placed on human life; if the cost of keeping someone alive is higher than that dollar value, then their life is judged “not worth living.” The logical thing to do in that case is to maximize savings and simplify the situation by encouraging the patient to accept euthanasia. This time, euthanasia advocates apologized for this in the case of Barbara Wagner—not because they believed they were wrong, but because the encouragement was offered with “insensitivity,” without “the human touch.” Next time? Who knows?

There’s a reason that in her first Facebook note on this subject, Gov. Palin’s thoughts went immediately to her son Trig: this sort of attitude is already dominant in the medical response to Down Syndrome babies. There’s a reason why over 90% of such babies are aborted, and it isn’t all about what the parents think or want, let me tell you. Or, better, let Gretchen tell you, from her post “Remembering” on the group blog Beautiful Work (HT: Jared Wilson):

It was 2 years ago this month that I was sitting in a chair looking at my unborn baby in 4D. She was precious! We had previously found out that our baby had several “markers” for down syndrome and had enlarged kidneys which may have required surgery upon birth. Thus we were monitored more carefully and had a ton more ultrasound shots at a hospital. This was the first level 3 ultrasound with this pregnancy (I had had one with my 3rd with no problems). I got to gaze upon my baby for almost a full hour—it was wonderful! I was there alone as my husband was out of town. The specialist doctor called me in after the ultrasound to go over the findings. The first words out of his mouth to me were “Well you will have to come in tomorrow for your abortion because of how far along you are.” I was utterly shocked and devastated. All I could do was mutter “What??????” He then proceeded to tell me that my baby had more “markers” for down syndrome and it didn’t look good. I was more shocked that his automatic assumption was that I would abort my baby. I almost couldn’t comprehend what he was telling me in that office. All I wanted to do was run as far away from that man as possible.

Read the whole post—it’s well worth it. Like the Palins, Gretchen and her husband opted to have the baby. The irony of their story is that their baby was born two years ago . . . without Down Syndrome, and in fact with no medical issues whatsoever. The automatic reflex of the medical system would have aborted a perfectly healthy little girl.

In all this, I think the reactions of Wagner’s ex-husband Dennis, on the one hand, and euthanasia advocate Derek Humphry, on the other (both quoted in the ABC News article), are telling. Here’s Humphry:

People cling to life and look for every sort of crazy cure to keep alive and usually they are better off not to have done it.

In other words, Humphry believes, people are better off dying than fighting to live. By contrast, here’s Dennis Wagner:

My reaction is pretty typical. I am sick and tired of the dollar being the bottom line of everything. We need to put human life above the dollar.

As it happens, I do believe his reaction is pretty typical among most folks; and in my experience, Humphry’s attitude is usually lurking in there among advocates of euthanasia, even if most of them can’t afford to be as blunt about it as the founder of the Hemlock Society, a man who has already “assisted” one wife into the grave. This really is the line between the sides here.

Now, at this point, you might be thinking that this doesn’t affect you all that much, because the concept of euthanasia doesn’t really bother you that much. What you need to understand, though, is that assigning dollar values to human lives corrupts the whole system—the extent to which that already happens with our private insurance bureaucracy is part of the problem with our health care system—and that when it’s the government doing the assigning, there’s no way to counterbalance that corruption, so it spreads unchecked. As is always the way with consequences propagating through a complex system, that produces changes beyond those which we have already thought to expect.

For instance, in that same first Facebook note, Gov. Palin pointed out a very important point made by Thomas Sowell: “Government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost.” She went on from there, as most critics have, to point out that this will inevitably result in the rationing of health care—and so it will, as it always does. But that will not be the only effect of this new reality if Obamacare goes into effect. C4P‘s Doug Brady has also pointed out that the US health care system drives most of the world’s medical innovation, including the creation of new drugs, and that government price controls will bring an end to most of that innovation. This too is true, and important; but it too is only part of the cost of price controls. It’s not merely that price controls will limit who receives medical care, or that they will depress the future potential of that care; they will also, over time, reduce the present value of that care.

To illustrate this, I want to take you inside a world which I hope is unfamiliar to most of you: that of the neo-natal intensive care unit, or NICU (pronounced “nick-you”). Specifically, I want to tell you a couple stories from the Canadian NICU experience. One, highlighted by Mark Steyn a couple months ago, comes from Hamilton, Ontario:

Hamilton’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was full when Ava Isabella Stinson was born 14 weeks premature at St. Joseph’s Hospital Thursday at 12:24 p.m.

A provincewide search for an open NICU bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two-pound, four-ounce preemie to Buffalo that evening.

Steyn comments,

Well, it would be unreasonable to expect Hamilton, a city of half-a-million people just down the road from Canada’s largest city (Greater Toronto Area, 5.5 million) in the most densely populated part of Canada’s most populous province (Ontario, 13 million people) to be able to offer the same level of neonatal care as Buffalo, a post-industrial ruin in steep population decline for half a century.

Unfortunately, as Steyn goes on to point out, whenever the Canadian government starts outsourcing its health care to the US, that creates additional complications:

When a decrepit and incompetent Canadian health bureaucracy meets a boneheaded and inhuman American border “security” bureaucracy, you’ll be getting a birth experience you’ll treasure forever:

Her parents, Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson, couldn’t follow their baby because as of June 1, a passport is required to cross the border into the United States. They’re having to approve medical procedures over the phone and are terrified something will happen to their baby before they get there.

Once Buffalo enjoys the benefits of Hamilton-level health care, I wonder where Ontario will be shipping the preemies to. Costa Rica?

The other story I want to tell you is my own. Our oldest daughter has dual US/Canadian citizenship by virtue of having been born in Vancouver, BC; I was a student in the country at the time, so we spent five years as net beneficiaries of the Canadian health care system. I’m not going to demonize it or try to deny its virtues; combined with the medical benefits my wife received for her job, she was without question our cheapest baby despite spending the first two weeks of her life in the NICU. Yet, as I wrote last summer, there were some enormous downsides to the system as well.

We had some truly brilliant doctors, and some wonderful nurses, and the staff at BC Children’s Hospital were beyond superb; they cared deeply about their tiny patients and were past masters at making bricks without straw. The thing is, they had to be.

The equipment was junk—they finally gave up on the blood-oxygen monitor on my little baby and took it off when it reported a heart rate of 24 and a blood-oxygen level of 0 (or the other way around—it’s been a few years now); while we were there, the provincial government tried to donate some of its used medical equipment, and no one would take it. The Sun quoted one veterinarian as saying the ultrasound they wanted to give him wasn’t good enough to use on his horses. Meanwhile, the doctors kept taking “reduced activity days,” or RADs (which is to say, they took scheduled one-day strikes without calling them strikes), to protest their contract. I was actually up at St. Paul’s in Vancouver for a scan one of those days; the techs were there, obviously, but no doctors. A hospital with no doctors is a very strange place.

I could also tell you about the time we took our daughter to the ER (different hospital) at midnight; there were only a few patients there at the time, but it still took them three hours just to get us into a room, and another hour to see us. It was 5am before we walked out the front door. At that, we were the lucky ones—there were a couple folks still waiting to be seen who’d been waiting when we got there.

Nor was our experience unusual, or even extreme; we prayed for people’s friends or family members dealing with serious illness, not just that they would get better, but simply that they would get treatment before they died. Sometimes they didn’t. That’s why (as I noted in that post) there’s an increasing movement against national health care in Canada and elsewhere (though not, as far as I understand, in Britain). That’s the kind of thing that happens when the dollar, not human life, is the bottom line of the health care system. We already have too much of that in our country as it is; what Sarah Palin understands, and why she’s leading the charge against Obamacare, is that letting the government run the system will only make it worse, not better. Yes, we need change; but for that change to bring actual hope, it needs to be changefor the better. Obamacare is the wrong prescription.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

Taking a look around

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I wasn’t out of touch with the world during our time away, just off the ‘Net for most of that time—but reading mediocre newspapers (which most of them are) and catching the occasional cable news show (sometimes with the sound off) doesn’t exactly give one a full-orbed view of current events; and then the first part of this week, I’ve been busy and occupied with other things, so it’s only been today that I’ve started to catch up a bit with the political news.

It’s interesting to see that Gov. Palin has pretty much gone mano a mano with President Obama over health care, defining the terms of the debate with her Facebook posts—to such an extent that even non-Palinites within the GOP are acknowledging that she’s taken the leadership of the party—and judging by the poll numbers, the Obama administration’s fixation on her, the recent market gains made by health insurers, and the decision of the Senate Finance Committee to drop consultations on end-of-life care from its version of the bill, it seems clear that she’s winning. Given that her op-ed on the cap-and-tax bill was a hammer blow to its political prospects, it would seem that Gov. Palin’s leadership has had a significant effect on the Obama administration’s legislative agenda.

Perhaps the most unnerving thing to happen during the last week or two was the White House’s decision to invite people to report on friends and neighbors who are opposed to Obamacare—something which doesn’t surprise me all that much, given the pattern of behaviorshown by Barack Obama and his coterie, but which is nevertheless concerning; on the bright side, at least it inspired a vintage effort from the redoubtable Mark Steyn in response.

As a result of all this, the polls aren’t being very kind to the president or his party. New Jersey is turning on his policies (and seems likely to put a Republican in the statehouse this fall), while Rasmussen is showing voters favoring the GOP on health care (and in fact on nearly every other issue as well) and the president’s approval ratings continuing to drop (just 47% approve, only 29% strongly, while 52% disapprove, including 65% of independents; on the bright side, only 37% strongly disapprove).

On a brighter note, it looks like our government has lost some of the bank bailout money:

Although hundreds of well-trained eyes are watching over the $700 billion that Congress last year decided to spend bailing out the nation’s financial sector, it’s still difficult to answer some of the most basic questions about where the money went.

Nice job, guys. That’s definitely the sort of thing to make people think twice about giving the feds even more money to play with. And in the meantime, as the government’s left trying to clean up the mess made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, here comes their cousin Ginnie Mae to make a whole new one. Startlingly, Congress doesn’t see anything wrong with this (though if Ginnie Mae does indeed crash, they will no doubt look for some way to blame it on George W. Bush).

On the foreign policy front, the Marines have launched a major assault in Afghanistan; the incomparable Michael Yon reports (if you can get the video to work; I always have trouble with PJTV). I wish them well, but no foreign power has ever really won in Afghanistan, and I’m not confident we’ll be the first. (This, btw, was the problem with Senator Obama’s insistence that Iraq was the wrong war, that we should have been fighting in Afghanistan; fighting in Iraq drew al’Qaeda down from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts and streets of Iraq, where we could actually get at them.)

All this is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg of everything the president has to keep track of; and all we expect of our presidents is that they keep track of all of it and know what to do about all of it. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for them . . . if it weren’t for the fact that they did everything possible to put themselves in that position.

The disease of political hatred

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As the vitriol, invective, and dishonest attacks against Sarah Palin continue to come from the Left, demonstrating that their determination to destroy her remains high—and as she continues to refuse to fight hatred with hatred and vitriol with vitriol, which is one of the reasons I support her as strongly as I do—I can’t help thinking yet again of what a disease hatred has become in our politics in this country. It’s hard to believe, from a rational perspective, that this is really what our politics has come to, that some people in this country hate others because they don’t like their views on tax policy, or immigration, or foreign policy, or gay marriage; but sadly, it has.

I can remember, more times than I can count, hearing people denounce George W. Bush as a thief, a liar, and an abuser of presidential authority, but most of the folks who made those accusations didn’t dislike him for those reasons. Sure, there were probably some who did, but for most, it was the other way around. That’s why is why people who wrote off President Clinton’s perjury then waxed furious against President Bush for lying to the American people—which if true put him in the company of FDR and Lincoln, among others—while others who wanted President Clinton impeached turned around to defend President Bush; it’s also why many who spent 2001-08 screaming bloody murder about “the imperial Presidency” and declaiming that the president should be impeached for “destroying the Constitution” are now perfectly happy as Barack Obama continues to expand executive power. If you want defenders of congressional prerogatives (outside Congress itself, anyway), you’ll have to look on the Right. The hypocrisy here—which is not confined to one side, by any means—is enough to make you gag.

The key thing about all these charges and denunciations is that people’s views of them tend to be defined by their politics, not the other way around. That’s why criticizing Clinton’s character never worked for the Republicans, and it’s why accusing Bush of lying didn’t work for the Democrats (it was the specter of losing in Iraq, combined with the Katrina fiasco, that killed his administration): in our current political climate, for far too many people, only the politics matter.

Those on our side (whichever one that is) are the white hats who can do no wrong, and we love them; those on the other side are the black hats who do everything from evil motives, and we hate them. If the other side lies, cheats, and steals, we proclaim it from the housetops. If our side does, well, the other side reporting it just proves what rotten people they are. Not everybody takes this approach, of course—to give conservatives credit, the reaction to the Ensign and Sanford scandals has been encouragingly different in many quarters—but more often than not, this is American politics in the early 21st century.

Of course, this is nothing new; much the same could have been said about American politics across much of the 19th century, which gave us our first presidential assassination and most of the dirtiest presidential elections in our history. For that matter, it was nothing new then, either; so it has been, I expect, in pretty much every society or group that has politics, at least some of the time. I’m not accusing contemporary America of any sort of new or different sin. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to do something about it—hatred is a sickness that could eat our country hollow from the inside, if we let it.

We need to start to fight this—and by we I don’t mean somebody out there, I mean us, the common folks, the ordinary barbarians of this country. This isn’t going to be solved by politicians, or the media, or any of the rest of our country’s elite—from their perspective, that would be counterproductive; after all, as long as they can exploit the hatred so many people have been taught to feel for their own ends, they’re going to carry right on doing so (and exacerbating it in the process). The only way to begin to break down this culture of animosity is to do it at the grassroots level, following the example of (of all people) David Mamet:

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read “conservative”), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. . . .

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler.

We need to do the same with those who disagree with us—not to change our minds, but to build relationships with our political opponents and listen to them respectfully, such that they know that we take their concerns seriously and with real care for what they think and feel and believe; that’s the only way we’re ever going to convince those across the political divide to do the same for us. We need to set aside the goal of changing people’s opinions—that might happen, but it shouldn’t be the purpose of conversation—and seek instead to change the way people hold their opinions, by building a spirit of disagreement in mutual understanding and respect.

The more we can do that, the worse it will be for our politicians—but the better it will be for us.

 

Clearing the decks

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There are folks out there (like Examiner.com‘s George Copeland) suggesting that Sarah Palin may have resigned from office to set up a run for the presidency in 2012, not as a Republican, but as an independent candidate. While I tend to doubt that that will be her approach, the party mandarins have every reason to worry about what she might do to them. After all, the last time Sarah Palin resigned from a position, it was the beginning of an all-out assault on the Alaska GOP, which had betrayed the party’s core principles with its corruption and cronyism. Following her resignation, her political career was widely pronounced dead at the scene, but in fact it was only the beginning of the political insurgency that would carry her to the governor’s mansion. The past is no guarantee of the future, but there is certainly considerable reason to think that we might see history repeating itself here.

And if so, there’s good reason for it. Michelle Malkin took a well-deserved rhetorical machete to the Beltway GOP last week after the news broke of David Keene’s utterly disgusting attempt to extort money from FedEx, declaring,

We’ve got major battles on the Hill and fundamental principles to defend.

Show the corrupted, Beltway-infected, power-drunk Republicans the door.

And get back to work.

I heartily agree. To this point, though, not enough Republican voters have; when I tried a while back to argue over on RedState that conservatives should back Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao (R-LA) in a primary challenge to Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), I was shouted down by a bunch of folks saying, in essence, “His voting record’s good—never mind the prostitution thing.” Here’s hoping that sort of attitude is starting to change; it has to. My second-favorite politician, Florida’s Marco Rubio, is right to say,

The Republican party should be the party that always understands that what people want more than anything else in life is for the chance to provide security for themselves and their family and to leave their kids better off than themselves. . . .

For many Americans our party has become indistinguishable from the Democrats. We’re viewed as the party of hypocrites who say one thing and do another.

The only way we’re going to fix that, and the only way we’re going to have a political party whose leaders represent and stay true to the beliefs and concerns of those who elect them, is to finish clearing the decks of the low-character power-focused Washington-corrupted lowlifes who currently make up the bulk of the national party establishment. Gov. Palin, throughout her political career, has been about cleaning folks like that out of the Republican Party, first locally and then on the state level. Now she’s stepping down from her position in Alaska so she can take them on—and take them out—on the national stage. All I can say is—you go, Gov.; we’re behind you every step of the way.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

Sarah Palin’s resignation: a calculated political act

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I’ve been flat on my back with an unpleasant bug, but the news yesterday of Sarah Palin’s resignation knocked me even flatter than I already was. My first thought was, “She’s finally decided that the price was too high, and she’s giving it all up”; my reaction was one of shame and anger at my own country, that had decided to destroy a gifted public servant rather than accept the challenge she represented.

And then after a while, I read her statement, and my brain started working again. I know there’s a lot of speculation about her motives—after all, politicians never tell you the real reason they do anything, right?—ranging from some kind of dirt that’s about to come out to a serious medical problem to marital issues under the strain of everything that’s been going on. I haven’t read all the speculation by any means, since I haven’t been at my computer much, but I can tell that a lot of folks out there think that this resignation must be (as most political resignations admittedly are) personal in nature, because it doesn’t make any political sense. With the case of Mark Sanford hanging in the near background, we’re primed to think this way.

On further reflection, though, I’m inclined to think that Sarah Palin’s resignation is probably in fact a political move at its core, and a brilliantly calculated one. It’s a gamble, no question, but I think the stakes are worth it, for several interlinked reasons—one of which Adam Brickley laid out yesterday with his usual excellent insight. It all begins (and began, I suspect) with a simple, huge question: should Gov. Palin run for re-election in 2010? I’ve gone back and forth on that one, but I’ve argued before that she would be better off not doing so.

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. . . .

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.

Now, I also noted along the way (with regard to the possibility of a special election for Ted Stevens’ Senate seat) that staying in Juneau “gives the Left two years to hammer her and try to bring her down before her term as governor is up in 2010,” and so indeed it has. She’s gone back to Alaska and done her job well—but her opponents have found an effective way to turn the job into a straitjacket, and one she’s paid handsomely to have the privilege of wearing. They’ve put her in a position where she gets hit with huge legal bills for anything and nothing, where she’s legally restricted in her ability to do what she need to do to repay those legal bills, and where they’ve found ways to make it very difficult for her to be nationally active. In the meanwhile, other Republicans who don’t have jobs have been taking advantage of that fact and doing everything they can to maneuver against her, and to denigrate her in the process.

The biggest arguments, as regards her national political future, for sticking around and running for re-election had to do with the need to go back, do her job, and show that she could get re-elected; with no one really doubting the latter, and the party mandarins refusing to give her credit for the former, there doesn’t seem to be much reason why Gov. Palin should want to stay in Juneau after 2010 unless she wants to be a career governor—and given the way the Alaskan establishment has treated her, she shouldn’t. The best political move she could make, it seems to me, was to elect not to run, but rather to pursue other angles.

This is where the argument Adam made comes into play, and it’s profoundly important. By stepping down now rather than waiting until 2010, she sets up Sean Parnell as the incumbent in that election, greatly increasing the chances that a Palinite Republican (which is to say, a non-Murkowski-RINO-ite impostor) holds the Alaska statehouse—and with the Exxon-TransCanada deal in the bag, she does so at a pretty favorable time.

There’s something of a gamble here, that Gov. Parnell will be able to carry the water, but she knows him better than most people do, and she seems pretty clearly to believe he can; while he lacks her formidable political gifts, he also lacks the vulnerabilities she acquired as a consequence of the McCain campaign, so he may actually be able to do an even better job of carrying forward their agenda than she could. At the very least, he ought to do plenty well enough to hold the seat as a proven incumbent.

In the process, his candidacy (assuming nothing crazy happens to remove him) will serve as a test of Gov. Palin’s ongoing political clout; and here’s where the wider angle of the gamble she’s taken comes in. She’s now free of the ankle-biters; they’ve been using the ethics law she brought into being as a tool for political persecution, and they’ve now lost that lever on her. She’s much freer to raise funds, to speak, to write, and to campaign around the country on behalf of causes and candidates without having to worry that she’ll be accused of ethics violations for doing so.

Indeed, it seems likely that anyone with aspirations for 2012 will need to spend much of 2010 proving themselves by campaigning for GOP congressional candidates across the country—and not only would Gov. Palin not have been able to do that had she been running for re-election herself, she might well not have been able to do so even as a lame duck. Can you imagine the ethics charges folks like Andree McLeod would have filed? I’m sure Gov. Palin can; no doubt they all would have been dismissed just as all the ones so far have been, but they still would have cost her a lot of money. Now, she doesn’t need to worry about that.

On sober reflection, then, leaving office may well have been the best political move Gov. Palin could have made—and a necessary precursor to a 2012 presidential run, if she wants to make one—and if so, then far better to do so now, when it frees her from abuse of her ethics law and enables her to control the transfer of power, than to wait for the end of her term. It may also be the wisest financial move she could make. Not only does this preclude further attempts to bankrupt her via frivolous prosecution, it also gives her a much wider field to raise funds and earn money.

I suspect we’re likely to see far, far more Sarah Palin appearances around the country over the coming months, to prove to people that she’s not backing down or going away—since one of the real gambles here is that people will label her a quitter, someone who can’t take the heat, and look for someone else to support; she needs to address that if she does in fact want a political future—and to help pay the bills; and also for one other reason, which I addressed in that post last fall:

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 revolutions 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.

Obviously, she in fact no longer has that day job, or soon won’t; the rest still holds, at least as regards Charles Krauthammer. I agree completely with Joshua Livestro’s takedown of Jonah Goldberg (and with VO’s, as well), and with all those who’ve pointed out that Ronald Reagan was similarly dismissed and derided for his intellect; but one of the reasons that the attempts to convince the public that Gov. Reagan, and then President Reagan, was merely “an amiable dunce” failed to stick is that he had a pretty strong record demonstrating otherwise. I agree that Joshua’s dead-bang right that folks like Goldberg need to begin with the presumption that Gov. Palin is to be taken seriously and talk with her on that basis; but clearly, that’s not going to happen unless they’re forced to do so. The only way to force them to do so, I think, is for Gov. Palin to put in the time and effort writing and speaking to make their current flippant dismissals of her clearly untenable. I think that’s an important thing for her to do, not only for her own political future, but for the future of the party, for the reasons I laid out in the quote above. And, sadly, she wasn’t going to be able to do it shackled to the statehouse in Juneau. Her enemies in Alaska had made that impossible. To spread her wings and fly, she needed to leave office.

And so she has; and I’m reminded of an image one of my mentors, the Rev. Ben Patterson, used in a sermon one time. He talked about being up in the Rockies, looking out across a mountain canyon, and seeing a bald eagle hurl itself from its perch high atop the canyon wall, wings and head pulled into a tight ball. He saw the eagle tumble down into the depths at dizzying speed, apparently doing nothing to protect itself . . . until suddenly, well below them, it snapped its wings out and began to soar. With no wind in the canyon, it had used its own fall to generate the momentum it needed to fly.

That, I think, is what Gov. Palin just did. The risk to it is real, for she’s thrown herself into the canyon of our political cynicism, where nothing surprising any politician does is ever innocent—we know better, they’re all guilty until proven guilty. All the folks who got egg on their face defending Mark Sanford just underscore the point; many, many people, even those predisposed favorably toward Gov. Palin, are going to assume that there’s another shoe to drop in her case just as there was in Gov. Sanford’s, and it’s going to take a fair bit of time for her to overcome that. There’s a lot of shock here—I know, I’m still recovering from it—and I expect a lot of people feel burned; it will take time for her to rebuild trust. She has the political and intellectual gifts to do it, given that time and effort on her part—but she’ll need those of us who’ve found her to be a beacon of hope in our country’s politics to continue to believe in her and support her, and to continue to trust her judgment.

There is good reason to do so. Just hang on; it’s going to be a bumpy ride, no doubt (has it ever been otherwise?), but I think it’s going somewhere good. And for my part, I continue to believe that Gov. Palin is walking with God and seeking his will, and so I trust that I see His hand in this, for her good, for the good of her family, and for the good of this nation.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

Nice line by Sarah Palin

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This from her speech to some of our troops in Kosovo, in response to a rather lame attempt at a joke by John Kerry (or is that redundant?):

Senator John Kerry makes this joke, I don’t know if you saw this, but he makes this joke saying, “Well, shoot, of all the governors in the nation to disappear, too bad it couldn’t have been that Governor from Alaska.”

Well, when he said it, you know, he looked quite frustrated, and he looked so sad, and I just wanted to reach out to the TV and say, “John Kerry, why the long face?”

(laughter, applause)

Now Gov. Palin is on to Germany to visit the wounded in our military hospitals there; in her time in Kosovo, she gave the troops at Camp Bondsteel a real morale boost, and also met with the Lithuanian Minister of Defense, Rasa Jukneviciene.

H. L. Mencken, Grover Cleveland, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama . . . and leadership

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Of all the blogs I’ve ever run across, I think Heaven Better Have Lightsabers has to have the most fun name. Fortunately, Hurley’s blog doesn’t waste its title. Today, he (?) has a post up called “H. L. Mencken on Leadership” which is a commentary on an extended quotation from a Mencken piece on Grover Cleveland, including these selections:

There was never any string tied to old Grover. He got into politics, not by knuckling to politicians, but by scorning and defying them, and when he found himself opposed in what he conceived to be sound and honest courses, not only by politicians but by the sovereign people, he treated them to a massive dose of the same medicine.

*****

No President since Lincoln, not even the melancholy Hoover, has been more bitterly hated, or by more people.

*****

He came from an excellent family, but his youth had been a hard one, and his cultural advantages were not of the best.

*****

He banged along like a locomotive. If man or devil got upon the track, then so much the worse for man or devil.

*****

Any man thus obsessed by a concept of duty is bound to seek support for it somewhere outside himself. He must rest it on something which seems to him to be higher than mere private inclination or advantage.

*****

He was not averse to popularity, but he put it far below the approval of conscience.

*****

It is not likely that we shall see his like again, at least in the present age. The Presidency is now closed to the kind of character that he had so abundantly. It is going, in these days, to more politic and pliant men. They get it by yielding prudently, by changing their minds at the right instant, by keeping silent when speech is dangerous. Frankness and courage are luxuries confined to the more comic varieties of runners-up at national conventions.

Hurley comments,

From my opinion it’s perfectly applicable to replace the ‘he/him/his’ with she and her, president with governor, and Grover Cleveland with Sarah Palin. I don’t know what the Governor wants in the future, but she doesn’t seem like the sort of lady who is going to let a hoard of ignorant tools define her as a person.

I have to agree, and to add that the last selection he cites is a dead ringer for Barack Obama (and, for that matter, for Joe Biden, definitely among “the more comic varieties of runners-up”). I am reminded in all this of a famous line about President Cleveland, from the speech in which he was nominated for what would be his second term (his third convention, since Benjamin Harrison held the office between Cleveland’s two terms), which I have often thought applies to Gov. Palin:

They love him for the enemies he has made.

Leftist faith and Sarah Palin

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In observing the sheer bloody-mindedness with which some on the Left cling, in the face of almost all evidence*, to the “Sarah Palin is a moron” meme, I’ve come to a conclusion: some liberals are just firmly convinced that all conservatives are stupid, or else we wouldn’t be conservatives. This just seems to be an article of absolute faith, core dogma, for some on the Left, judging by the way they treat folks on the Right. Given that, no amount of evidence to the contrary can shake their conviction; they dogmatically insist that Sarah Palin is a moron, with no supporting evidence offered save the fact that she’s conservative, and therefore by definition must be a moron. It’s simply a matter of faith that they are the enlightened ones, and she is not.

Which is to say that perhaps we’ve been wrong in talking about conservative Christians as the “faith-based community”; there’s a section of the Left that’s every bit as much a faith-based community as all that. The difference is, their faith isn’t in God, but rather in their own superiority.

*Sure, there’s the Katie Couric interview, in which Gov. Palin most assuredly did not acquit herself well—though even there, she did a lot better than the editing made her look. But hey, even the brightest folks look really dumb sometimes; at least she didn’t say there are 57 states, or that Austrians speak Austrian, or give the British government a middling assortment of DVDs that can’t be played in Britain, or try to get into the Oval Office through a window. Even Barack Obama looks like an imbecile at times, and Joe Biden like a blithering idiot—though to be sure, VP Biden actually is a blithering idiot . . .