PrintJuly 5, 2009
Sarah Palin -- All In
There is a point in tournament poker where one player doesn't have the chips to play out the next raise, but they have great cards, so they call "all in." At that point, nobody can raise them and the hand gets played out -- either to a game changing win or a total loss for the person who made the call.
It appears Sarah Palin decided she and her family could no longer deal with the thousand cuts, so she is "all in."
Palin may well decide to stay home and make macaroni and cheese for the kids, but history may not let her. She has already established herself as a major player -- candidate or not. More importantly, the wildly critical left has put her in a financial position where she has no choice but to speak out, perhaps do a book, and make the money she needs to pay legal bills for 15 unwarranted "ethics" investigations, all of which she handily won. The legal bills remain.
One doubts that when she speaks out, it will be about how to field dress a moose. Rather, she will take positions in speaking and writing about her core beliefs. That is a problem for the radical left of their own creation.
Palin enters the arena where the fight is not between liberal and conservative; nor is it between Republican and Democrat. The fight is between elite and the common person who works every day and continually asks how Washington D.C., under both parties, is so out of control.
Elitism has never been popular in America. Major American critics from H.L Menken to Rush Limbaugh made careers poking fun at elites.
Elitism is on display today as never before. Senate and Congressional seats are passed down in the family. Just look at the family members lining up for Ted Kennedy's seat or Caroline's assumption that she deserved the New York Senate seat. Vice President Biden's Senate seat is being kept warm for his son, now serving in the Middle East. Lots of talk that Michelle Obama may be the next Illinois senator.
Hereditary government on display. How much more elitist can a nation become?
The fight is between an out of control government led by media and government elites and common sense Americans, of both parties, who have had enough. Sarah Palin is in the enviable, although personally painful position, of being the "anti elite" voice of common sense and shared American values.
The vicious left put her there and now they may live to regret it.
When informed of the invention of "poison gas" by Admiral Cochrane, the Duke of Wellington cautioned that "that is a game two can play." He wisely chose not to go there because it would certainly be used by both sides.
The parallel exists with Saul Alinsky, the progenitor of much radical leftist smear techniques. His key dictum was that ridicule had no antidote. Sarah Palin was wildly successful heaping ridicule on Obama during the campaign, when he was at his best.
Nothing is more easily and cogently ridiculed than elitism.
Obama even appointed an elite college professor who posits that animals should have legal rights to sue their owners. Can one imagine Sarah Palin foisting this foolish, elitist intellectual on the question: "well, then professor, shouldn't a 6 month, developed fetus have the same legal rights as a chicken?" Make Obama defend that position.
Now Obama is finding the treading a bit harder. Rasmussen polls show a weakening of his approval numbers and all polls agree that most Americans do not support cap and tax, do not want illegals to get health care funded by taxpayers and now are becoming pro life. Wide swaths of informed citizens are coming to understand man made global warming is a hoax used to heap new energy taxes on them. Only elites, from both parties, can propose such nonsense.
Even Colin Powell, the truest weathervane of elitist thinking, is openly questioning Obama's spending. Certainly he did not get these doubts from listening to Rush Limbaugh. Perhaps, Colin Powell senses where this is going, and it is not going his way.
Sara Palin takes on the "fancy people" from a position, eagerly given to her by her enemies, of being a "common" person who went to an ordinary college, has typical family problems, is married to a guy who works in an oil field, buys her kid's diapers at WalMart. If the fight is with the elites, what better background could one have?
Ayn Rand said that there is right and there is wrong, and everything in the middle is evil. Sarah Palin is not a person from the middle. She has her beliefs and lives them in her daily life. Her children are her life's work, they are not accessories.
Nobody is better positioned, as a candidate or commentator, to take on the elites and the nonsense they put forward.
What an irony if the only American President who can make a 3 point shot were taken out by a point guard who came up to his shoulder. And if the guard was a chick -- who went to a no name school?
