Conservative pundits RE: Palin

Posted by editorial_views

Posted: November 18, 2008 - 3:52 pm

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What kind of reviews is Sarah Palin getting from conservative pundits, now that she's in post-election mode? Here's a sampling.

On the favorable side:

Mona Charen defended Palin against McCain campaign gossip at Townhall.com:

Who really believes that she didn't know Africa is a continent? Puh-leeeze! People know that insiders engage in this kind of blame shifting all the time. If Sarah Palin spends the next couple of years using her obvious smarts to bone up on national and international issues, she will be fine. She has a rare combination of charisma, the common touch, and firm values.

It would be self-defeating for the Republican Party to toss her aside just because she debuted on the national stage too early.

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Michelle Malkin did likewise on the same conservative website:

Let's assume for a moment that the McCain rumormongers are telling the truth about Palin (and I don't believe they are). Who would it damn more: Palin, or McCain and his vetters, who greenlighted her for the vice presidential nomination? Don't need a fancy Ivy League degree to figure that one out.

Hollywood savaged Palin. Journalists mocked her. Liberal blogs slimed her. Opponents cursed her, Photoshopped her, hacked her e-mail, hanged her in effigy, called her bigot, Bible-thumper and bimbo, and attacked her husband and children. But nothing Palin endured during the election season compares to the treatment she's receiving from these backstabbing blabbermouths who worked on the same campaign she poured herself into over the last three months.

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Karin Agness, president of the Network of Enlightened Women, gives two thumbs up to Todd Palin's performance as candidate's spouse:

He was "Manliness in Action," she wrote.

Todd Palin appeared on the campaign trail as a guy’s guy, a manly man, in all the right ways. He is manliness in action. He is tough, yet gentle. He is a champion snowmobile racer, even finishing a 400 mile race this year with a broken arm. He seamlessly weaves between the oil fields, commercial fishing waters and a home full of children. Through it all, he looks at his wife with glowing adoration.

Todd Palin, who Alaskans know as the First Dude, is so natural in his role as a male spouse to a female candidate that he was one of the least criticized aspects of Sarah Palin’s Vice Presidential run. There were not endless stories printed about his dress, hair, speeches or parenting.

Sarah Palin has become one of the most powerful women in America without neutering her husband. He is still a guy.

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Over at slate.com, conservatives were more critical.

Tucker Carlson apparently wasn't impressed with Palin's - um - verbal skills. On Slate's forum, The Conservative Crackup, he wrote:

After the (Republican) party has settled on what it believes, it ought to go shopping for a leader. I recommend someone who speaks fluent English. This matters, it turns out, and not just for aesthetic reasons. In a democracy, eloquence is a basic condition of leadership. A president has a moral as well as a political obligation to explain his program. His constitutional powers are limited to just a few (war, the veto). His real authority comes from persuasion.

It helps if you can talk.

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Kathleen Parker didn't succumb to Palin's "folksy charm":

Palin whipped up crowds, winking her way through attacks against Obama that telegraphed, "He's not one of us." We saw the cackling white man toting an Obama monkey to a rally and listened slack-jawed as country singer Gretchen Wilson belted out "Redneck Woman" while Palin clapped and lip-synched her favorite song.

They saw in Palin a kindred spirit who was fearless in defending bedrock values of family, country, and, yes, belief in a higher authority. What they failed to acknowledge was that Obama and family-churchgoing, well-educated exemplars of community service-were the embodiment of those same values, a Rockwellian portrait rendered with the brushstrokes of our professed core beliefs that all men are created equal-and that through hard work, anyone can become anything in the United States of America.

The Republican base is fast becoming a racial and cultural minority. . . .. Her supporters were willingly blind to her weaknesses. . .

What a great many others saw was someone out of her depth, whose lack of knowledge-and apparent lack of intellectual curiosity was a bonding agent with the Republican base.

Palin covered her inadequacies with folksy charm and by drumming up a class war, turning her audiences not just against elites but against the party's own educated members.

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I had to add this one, even though it's from an ultra-liberal columnist - because of the witty headline: "The Moose Stops Here. It's from Frank Rich of the New York Times.

Palin's manic post-election publicity tour, which may yet propel her and "the first dude" to "Dancing With the Stars," is almost a parody of the McCain ad likening Obama to Paris and Britney. Anyone who says so is promptly called out for sexism by the P.C. police of the newly "feminist" G.O.P. . . .

The good news for Democrats is a post-election Gallup poll finding that while only 45 percent of Americans want to see Palin have a national political future (and 52 percent of Americans do not), 76 percent of Republicans say bring her on.

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