The politics of personal destruction, intra-GOP edition: take 2

R. A. Mansour, explaining the reason and purpose for the founding of Conservatives4Palin, wrote,

Sarah Palin wasn’t able to return home from the campaign. The campaign continues, and she is forced to fight a war on two fronts—the local and the national. As long as the campaign continues, we’ll be here to watch her back.

This continues to be true; and the most frustrating part is that each of these fronts in turn has two fronts, as she is assailed both by liberals, from whom one would expect no better, and also by other conservatives.  I have to think that Reagan would be infuriated by the way in which his Eleventh Commandment (“Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican”) is routinely ignored when it comes to Gov. Palin; I also think that he would have no trouble diagnosing the reason.  President Reagan famously had a plaque on his desk that read, “There is no limit to what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit”; these people who are attacking her, and cloaking their attacks in the language of conservatism, aren’t doing so for reasons of principle, but because they care who gets the credit.  They care very much, and they don’t want it to be her.

What they fail to understand is that when you care who gets the credit, that sharply limits what you can accomplish—and the more you care, the more limited you are.  Hurting Gov. Palin may well increase the chance that Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush or Tim Pawlenty wins the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, but even more, it increases the chance that Barack Obama wins the 2012 general election.  The only politicians who profit from attacks on Sarah Palin are Democrats, and the only party that is helped is the Democratic Party.  Republicans of influence, be they in office or in the conservative media, need to grow up, shut up, and stop trying to run down Gov. Palin, because not only is it wrong, it’s only going to hurt them and their preferred causes, not help them; the knife they plant in her back is the knife in their own.  Republicans acting like Democrats only profits Democrats.

Posted in Politics, Sarah Palin.

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