Sarah Palin

I guess Mrs. Palin had sym­pa­thy for Michael Jack­son’s fam­i­ly. I come home and it seems like every­thing in my Google Read­er is about Sarah Palin. There is plen­ty of spec­u­la­tion about why she is resigning.

I have seen argu­ments that her resign­ing the gov­er­nor­ship will not hurt her pres­i­den­tial chances in 2012, and I have seen argu­ments that her chances for the pres­i­den­cy are now fin­ished. I would tend to agree with the lat­ter. I do not see some­one win­ning the pres­i­den­cy when oppo­nents can point and say “quit­ter.”

Time will tell.

I have nev­er been a fan of Sarah Palin. But I can see how she did well in Alas­ka. And I can see how she may have been good for Alas­ka. Alas­ka has 571,951.26 square miles and a pop­u­la­tion of 686,293 for a den­si­ty of 1.19 peo­ple per square mile. Plus, the state has large quan­ti­ties of nat­ur­al resources. Res­i­dents do not pay state tax­es, they get a check from the state for their share of the nat­ur­al resource prof­its! (that’s social­ism if any­one cares).

Giv­en those facts, how much state gov­ern­ment do Alaskans need? Very lit­tle. Pal­in’s ide­ol­o­gy is min­i­mal gov­ern­ment. A per­fect fit.

When Palin was picked as McCain’s VP can­di­date, I had two prob­lems with her. I did not agree with her ide­ol­o­gy and she was not pre­pared to deal with the issues of the coun­try at large. Yes, she had her ide­al­o­gy and she had what she knew to do for Alas­ka, but she clear­ly had not giv­en the issues of the coun­try as a whole much thought. I would want the VP to have spent a bit more time think­ing about Iraq, Afgan­istan, Israel, and Iran; health care, reces­sions, bub­bles, and fed pol­i­cy than can be done in a six month cram ses­sion while furi­ous­ly trav­el­ing the coun­try campaigning.

I have no idea of what her plans are. And I wish her well. But if she is plan­ning to run for pres­i­dent in 2012 or 2016, I hope she uses the inter­im time to become famil­iar with the issues that a pres­i­dent may have to deal with so she can dis­cuss them with­out so much reliance on con­ser­v­a­tive boilerplate.

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