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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pompsander who wrote (14883)	7/6/2009 4:37:12 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 103300

Palin to 'host on CNN'????? Palin Declares Victory With a Trip to Bizarre Commentary by Margaret Carlson bloomberg.com July 6 (Bloomberg) -- Alaska Governor Sarah Palin chose the long 4th of July weekend to announce that she hadn’t simply decided not to run for a second term, she was refusing to finish her first one. Palin backed in to her announcement Friday at a press conference on the shore of Lake Lucille attended by her family and a few neighbors by criticizing “how much fun some governors have as lame ducks. When they hit the road, they draw a paycheck, they kind of milk it.” Hello Mark Sanford. But there will be no such fun for Palin. For her “to plod along” as governor would be “a worthless, easy path. Only dead fish go with the flow. A quitter’s way out.” As she explained it, “I’m not wired to operate under the same old politics as usual.” There comes a point when not practicing politics as usual becomes so unusual it borders on the bizarre. Palin isn’t turning Alaskans over to two years of a caretaker chief executive to serve the poor, pursue a cause, or spend more time with her family but to join the media she hates. She has a book contract with Harper Collins, is likely to give paid speeches and possibly host her own TV show. Her governing resume remains thin but her exposure in the Lower 48 is high. Palin is so bitter the speech could have ended with an announcement that the press wouldn’t have her to kick around anymore. Tough Year Palin has had a tough year, most recently a dustup with talk-show host David Letterman, where Palin decided to take a tasteless joke previously told by Jay Leno and on “Saturday Night Live” and twist it into a fresh attack by a pervert on her 14-year-old daughter. Last week a 10,000 word article in Vanity Fair magazine by Todd Purdum described Palin’s difficulties running Alaska and the assessment by staffers of her running mate, Senator John McCain, that she was a little bit nutty. They couldn’t abide her by the end of the campaign and are convinced she’ll never be ready to lead. Besides old stuff about her $150,000 wardrobe, and her going “rogue,” McCain aides revealed how she wanted to go with a family story she knew wasn’t true, that she called McCain campaign chief Stephen Schmidt a liar and stopped speaking to anyone but her family. Her ability to focus was so minimal that she refused to prepare for her interview with CBS’s Katie Couric. The Vanity Fair piece was less important for what it said than what it did: expose the divisions raging within the party behind a thin veneer of civility. Party Divide One side, led by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, the intellectual heart of the party, thinks this new face with a favorability rating of more than 70 percent in some Republican polls can lead the party out of the wilderness. The other, personified by Schmidt, the operative heart of the party, see her as an ingenue who didn’t rise to the occasion and whose hunger for the spotlight is an impediment to rebuilding the GOP. Kristol who’s been pushing Palin since he stopped in Alaska on a cruise in 2007 to have dinner with her, immediately figured that the unnamed top aide in the Vanity Fair piece was Schmidt. Kristol had heard him talk in private about Palin being so out of control the staff thought she was suffering from post-partum depression after the birth of her son Trig. Kristol had barely hit the send button on his blog before Schmidt fired back calling the charge “categorically false.” “I’m sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign,” Schmidt wrote. “After all, his management of Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away.” Kristol’s Praise Republicans used to leave this kind of intraparty warfare to the Democrats. Kristol quickly praised Palin’s decision. Now she can “travel the country and the world, campaign for others, meet people, get more educated on the issues -- and without being criticized for neglecting her duties in Alaska. And haven’t conservatives been lamenting the lack of a national leader?” Abandoning your post so prematurely hardly seems the stuff of leadership. Things weren’t going well in Alaska as she fought legislators on both sides of the aisle, and more than a dozen ethics complaints. She had to pay the state back for travel expenses charged for time when she was at home. Oil revenue was down, as were her favorability ratings. You can see why she wanted a gigantic do-over. Enemies Needed John Coale, a lawyer who set up Palin’s PAC and legal defense fund after meeting her during an interview conducted by his wife Greta Van Susteren, worries she may have squandered her “incredible raw talent.” Palin is one of those people who can live without a friend but not without an enemy. She thrives amid chaos: alienating much of Alaska’s establishment, including venerable former Alaska Governor Walter Hickel; exposing colleagues for sins she committed; a teenage pregnancy and feuds in the press with Levi Johnston -- the father of her grandchild -- whom she touted at the Republican National Convention as the prince who would marry her pregnant daughter Bristol. If controversy doesn’t find her she creates it. Rather than give Bristol time to adjust to motherhood, she pushed her into being an unconvincing spokeswoman for abstinence. Palin’s ascension in the party was always just about her, not about anything she’d done, what she stood for or the issues she cared about. Catapulted to stardom by her personality, she is now dropping any pretense of putting her head down, governing and emerging as a more substantive candidate. She thinks she’s better off erasing the past and starting over. CNN is pursuing her. If she wants to be Wolf Blitzer, she might be making the right move. (Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.) To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net Last Updated: July 6, 2009 00:01 EDT