Sarah Palin’s resignation: a calculated political act

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)