PJ: For entertainment value, a lot of people want Sarah Palin to run for president. Late night comics are praying daily for the opportunity to quote her verbatim and earn laughs by doing so.
International Herald Tribune
Chasing Sarah Palin
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
Here’s our story so far: Sarah Palin is picked to run for vice president, builds up a big fan club of disgruntled, right wing Americans and loses. She returns briefly to Alaska, but then finds the job of running a state that lives off federal dollars and oil revenue too taxing and not nearly lucrative enough. She quits, writes a smash best seller, charges who knows what for public appearances, and keeps her celebrity going by pretending for a while to be thinking about running for president.
I was highly critical of John McCain’s choice of Ms. Palin in 2008, and found her “I’m an American, you’re not” tone grating and insulting. She represented an inchoate anger among voters that has been fostered by the Republican Party for decades as an electoral ploy—as well as a willful ignorance about the world that is not my favorite American trait.
But you’ve got to say this about Sarah Palin: she hangs in there when it comes to being a celebrity. On Monday, she gave an interview to a reliable and unabashed admirer, Eric Bolling of Fox News, who said that everyone he knows wants her to run. He pointed out that it’s “not too late.”
Ms. Palin did not exactly wave her hand and say, well, gee, if everyone insists on me running for the White House, I might just have to.
But she did say, “You know, it’s not too late for folks to jump in.” And then she came out with the perfect anti-Shermanesque statement: “ And I don’t know, you know, it—who knows what will happen in the future?”
Ms. Palin had a lot of other things to say—about people who don’t believe in Jesus and how they’re trying to ruin Christmas, about how incompetent she thinks President Obama is and, of course, since all Republican conservatives are required to say this, how great Ronald Reagan was.
She was, as always, full of folksy aphorisms – “grace runs downhill to the humble;” the need to make sure “we’re sweeping our own porch.” She also had this to say: “here, in North Korea, babies are reliant on China.”
The interview left me curious as to what Ms. Palin means by “here,” and it made me realize I that miss her. She’s far more entertaining than the current crop of Republicans, especially now that Herman Cain’s out. I hope she jumps right into the race and runs downhill with a broom to clean up the awful mess those North Korean babies left on our porch.
http://loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/chasing-sarah-palin/
No comments:
Post a Comment