How to Put Out the Fire

Let’s just throw more gasoline on it! Liquid puts out fire, right?

Another entry into the venerable “sin makes you stupid” category, this one focuses on the sin of greed. Speculation is little better than gambling with the world’s energy. Let’s know it off, shall we?

The Palin Problem

I’ve been reluctant to write this piece. I really have. Because it means admitting I was wrong, and I hate that, probably more than anything. I’m a very proud man, so when I’m wrong, I’m forced to operate my mouth with some sort of mechanical device to force the words out, or to have some sort of limb-control machine, operated from across the room, force theses words to be typed. I don’t like admitting when I’m wrong. It means I’m not as smart as I like to think I am.

I’m also not entirelyI sure, though, what I was wrong about. Clearly it was something. I was a big booster for Palin before she was even the nominee; I liked her reformist record, the fact that she’s young and attractive and undeniably pro-life, that she’s Alaskan (with the frontier mentality it brings, like she’s John Fremont or Ole’ Rough and Ready). I liked that she had a clear record of working with her own opposition. I even thought it was cool she addressed the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party convention, because I’m pleased as punch whenever any politician acknowledges the existence of our many third parties.

Her sudden resignation, though, on 3 July threw me off. How could she be doing that? I watched my TV in disbelief, not because she’s some savior, or even someone I particularly admire, but because I can’t understand what on earth she was hoping to accomplish. I’m pretty politically savvy; I generally understand why politicians do what politicians do, and love watching them play the Presidential power game. It’s thrilling, laugh-a-minute, crash-a-minute sort of stuff that’s always been addictive as hell. And while I have my theories about her resignation, none of them really make any bloody sense.

1. The reason she cited – Since the campaign ended, she has not been able to do her job. Due to the circumstances of her election, where she challenged and defeated an incumbent Republican governor to whom many in the Alaskan legislature were loyal, she has had to find her support largely among the relatively-conservative Democrats of Alaska. But after 2008, she no longer has a working relationship with them; she’s become an immense figure in the GOP, adopted the Culture Warrior mantle she hadn’t worn in the Governor’s Office before, and by and large the two sides have become very alienated from each other. So she now has no support at all in the legislature, and is finding it impossible to accomplish a thing.
2. The other reason she cited – The constant stream of baseless ethics complaints, which consistently prove false but which she is constitutionally obligated to combat on her own dime. She has spent over $500,000 of her own money fighting them, and the State of Alaska upwards of two-million investigating them, but evidence suggests they’re being submitted by opposition researchers trying to accomplish — something. Due to these constant distractions, she maintains she cannot do her job.
3. The National Stage reason — Palin got her taste of national politics, and now Alaska seems awfully small. Her resignation frees her up to pursue a career in the Lower Forty-Eight and build up some more national cred in pursuit of the Presidency in 2012. This one seems the most likely to me, although unlike many of her supporters, I don’t think this was a smart plan on her part, let alone political genius. Her term as governor was set to expire in 2011, giving her ample time to prepare a national run. And, if she resigned to pursue a Senate primary against Lisa Murkowski — the only move she could take that would make this make any effing sense at all — she should have announced that right off the bat.

Palin is still, I believe, well-positioned for a run in the 2012 GOP primaries, but not because of anything she’s done. She’s disputably the crowned head of a massive chunk of the Republican party’s base, and there isn’t a single candidate who fires up the imagination for them anywhere near the way she does. Mitt Romney is suspect both because of his religion and his shallow conservative credentials. Mike Huckabee, while a good and intelligent man with a following all his own, I can’t imagne him having the star power that Palin has, which will attract primary voters. She’s got such a loyal group behind her that she starts the primary season with something of an advantage, at least as the ground looks right now, in mid 2009, which will be hard to overcome unless she continues to make an idiot of herself. Note; continues. Because she’s been doing it all year. It’s become painful to watch, and I hope she stops.

So no. She’s not acting in some sort of genius master plan. She’s stumbling along, uncertain of what to do with her national following and media attention, and trying to display some sort of leadership so that she can credibly contintue to possess these forces plague her with both trouble and opportunity. If she challenged Murkowski in 2010, we’ll get a better sense of what she’s trying to do.

If she doesn’t, I don’t know what the hell is going on.