Taking The Easy Way

Giv­en what Sarah Palin has been up to since I last com­ment­ed on her, I have to con­clude that she resigned as gov­er­nor to either cash in or to run for pres­i­dent. If she left to cash in, then I guess she’s not doing too bad a job of it.

But if she does indeed plan to run for pres­i­dent, then I do not believe she is going about things in a help­ful way. In a post at Frum­Fo­rum, Danielle Crit­ten­den describes a Palin appear­ance at a char­i­ty fundrais­er in Cana­da. Her appear­ance fee appar­ent­ly was between $100,000 and $200,000, so that is def­i­nite­ly cash­ing in.* Beyond the hefty fee, Crit­ten­den describes how every­thing was arranged to lim­it Pal­in’s expo­sure to unscript­ed or unan­tic­i­pat­ed situations.

I am not pay­ing enough atten­tion to Palin to know if this is how her appear­ances are nor­mal­ly han­dled. Assum­ing that it is, then this is poor train­ing for a pres­i­den­tial run. Her cozy perch at Fox News is also no help. Now is exact­ly when she should be mak­ing as many appear­ances as pos­si­ble and expos­ing her­self to unscript­ed sit­u­a­tions fre­quent­ly so she can com­pile some expe­ri­ence deal­ing with them. One does not get elect­ed to the pres­i­den­cy with­out an abil­i­ty to ad lib a wide vari­ety of situations.

Sure, if she fol­lowed this advice, she might com­pile a resume of gaffs. But the gaffs would be ancient his­to­ry by the time 2012 came around.

* Long ago I read some­where a com­ment that when­ev­er an esti­mate var­ied by 100% or more, one could infer that there was real­ly no clue as to the actu­al num­ber and the esti­mate was worse than worth­less. So who knows how much she was actu­al­ly paid!