Palin Trying Trial and Error

Sarah Palin is like family to many conservatives, and not just because she would gladly bring a caribou casserole to your cousin’s graduation party.  More significantly, only those who sympathize with her are offering worthwhile criticism.  It’s like how you’d yell at your own sibling or child for misbehaving but would rightfully detonate if someone else issued a random haranguing: you must be close to be that candid, in part because you truly have the recipient’s best interests in mind.

Similarly, many on the right are reflexively defensive when outsiders disparage Palin.  Some are at the point where they snap at anyone who looks askew at her.  That’s an understandable overreaction based upon how spitefully liberals and their media pals have treated her.  Still, gently pointing out her flawed decisions is constructive.  Righties just have to remember to offer helpful pointers.   Refraining from wallowing in negativity will keep conservatives from devolving into the sort of dysfunctional family that keeps a shrink on retainer.

Her most debated recent decision involved not what she said but where and when she said it.  Namely, Palin’s decision to participate in last week’s Tea Party Convention resulted in a fantastic speech  (h/t Tammy Bruce).  And she can rightly claim that she attended to address the true Tea Partiers regardless of the organizers’ motivations (h/t Teri Christoph).  But she still should put one more date on her itinerary, especially considering the questions swirling around the structure of the last party she attended.

She shouldn’t neglect the other party.  Despite the organizer’s different kind of noted troubles, CPAC remains an ideal site for walking among the grassroots.  Instead, co-worker Glenn Beck gets to talk to the folks while Palin abstains.  Still, her guardians would point out that her intentions were true even if she’s mistaken by not meeting and greeting both sets of conventioneers.

She’s also picked a horse that most conservatives would prefer to see lose.  The best hope for Rand Paul is that it turns out he’s not as crazy as Dad Ron.  Don’t raise your hopes.  Palin’s outsider-siding ways make her appealing,  But she should take care next time to back someone who’s not so, say, enthusiastically anti-Patriot Act if she wants to appeal to non-Dale Gribble-style conservatives.

More understandable is an act of campaigning kindness she offered to her liberal-leaning former partner.  John McCain put her on the map, after all, although of course she repaid him by serving as the only exciting aspect of his supremely crummy effort.  Her decision to appear alongside the man who sucks the fun out of the word “maverick” is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan endorsing the Brady Bill as a favor to his friend: at certain moments, the personal trumps the political.

On top of that, some don’t like her new job.  Critics have speculated that her stint as a Fox News commenter will slow her down if she’s serious about eventually running for higher office.  But she gets to make fun of the president on television, which qualifies it as the most fun job in America.  In more mature terms, she has yet one more platform she can use to establish her views while establishing how well she can articulate same views.

Still, the Hunter Governor should start taking better advice, or at least hire better advice-giver-outers.  She’s committed a handful of what we can generously classify as gaffes.  But this is a good time for her to learn from curious decisions, especially since the actions in question at least seem to have been made with good intentions.

Plus, there’s one important thing to remember while she endorses odd candidates or attends for-profit Tea Parties: she maintains an undeniably solid philosophy.  Palin remains a plainspoken defender of a nation whose strength descends from its limited national government.  That tendency is most evident in her succinctly cogent Facebook posts, which counteract all the damage inflicted upon civilization by FarmVille.

Set the minor slip-ups aside: she recognizes more than any other public figure that America is great not because of what its government does but rather because of what it allows Americans to do. 

Learning by doing is fine as long as the emphasis is on the “learning” part.  This is a particularly important time for her if she plans the aforementioned career change, namely from media commentator to America-runner.  With, understandably, no clear Republican frontrunner yet for 2012, (h/t Clayton Morris) she can goof up a little now as she strives to polish her image.

The lead is hers to grasp if she’s ready to go.  While Mike Huckabee might presently be able to boast of more individual campaign donors, that tally doesn’t count the 17 trillion books or so sold by the right’s favorite author.  Now, she just has to work toward ensuring the second volume can be shorter on account of it containing fewer pages devoted to bloopers.

In any case, her miscalculations will never approach those of the current officeholder even if she ends up holding the same responsibilities.  Of all the disreputable aspects of Barack Obama’s first presidential year, the worst may be how he’s trying, and failing, to learn on the job.  While he’d be a sad leftist even 20 years from now, he could still use seasoning to learn how to react properly under duress.

By contrast, Palin wouldn’t spend her time in the White House sucking up to Iran’s hoodlum regime while provoking our Honduran, Colombian, British, Israeli, Polish, Czech, South Korean, Indian, Canadian, Georgian, or other friends.  She’d trust us to stimulate the economy instead of assuming she can micromanage our finances from the Oval Office, too.  Most of all, there’s little fear that she would get into the habit of bowing to foreign leaders, including Her Royal Highness, the Queen of Tampa Bay.

Conservatives should keep her natural abilities in mind and afford her ample leeway.  If nothing else, small-government aficionados should overlook her occasional missteps simply because of the attributes we see in her enemies. Namely, they’re consistently the insufferably vitriolic types who slapped “CHRISTIAN FASCIST” bumper stickers upon their Volkswagens in January 2001.  That’s when her antagonists aren’t simply nasty, troubled, sad humans.

Palin provokes the same reaction among the stammering left that the previous president did, namely the W. Twitch.  We should petition doctors to update the syndrome’s name, as those infected now robotically spew venom at their new favorite adversary.  Most notoriously, her enemies shriek about how the underwhelming litany of colleges she attended speaks to her dimness, although that fails to simultaneously account for how Yale and Harvard man Bush can be such a dunce.

Her wholly conservative values are the best reason to offer her support.  But Palin is worth cheering for just to irritate the people who think she’s a mere simpleton.  Their hilariously apoplectic reaction to everything she says and does is fantastic in itself.  The level and pitch of hatred tells us that the Rogue Queen must be doing something correctly.

Our favorite Alaskan will sharpen her approach and tactics with time.  Meanwhile, before they give her further grief about how she’s nowhere near as brilliant as they are, Palin’s archenemies ought to ensure that the dumb things they accuse her of saying weren’t actually uttered by that 30 Rock woman.         

Anthony Bialy is a freelance writer and “Red Eye” Conservative in Western New York.  He blogs at http://thebuffalobean.com and tweets at http://twitter.com/AnthonyBialy.

Popularity: 1% [?]