She's out!

Although I was never really persuaded that former half-term Governor Sarah Palin was going to enter the Best of the Worst 2012 competition, I must report with some disappointment that Palin announced today that she is not going to run for president.


Instead of concentrating on the message that she sent to supporters, the following snip from the linked post pretty much sums up the reality of why running at this point just wasn't in the cards:

While she maintains a loyal fan base, Palin reached a tipping point in polls months ago. Had she gotten into the race at this late stage, she would have been a second-tier candidate at best. She polls in the single-digits, gets mixed reviews on her leadership qualities even among Republicans, and performs poorly against President Obama in head-to-head matchups.

In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, 66 percent of Republican and GOP-leaning respondents said they did not want Palin to run.

Of course, this was just the most recent Palin-related news of the day. Two other items of passing note:


1) Roger Ailes: I hired Sarah Palin ‘because she was hot’

In an interview celebrating the 15th anniversary of Fox News, Ailes told The Associated Press that he hired the former Republican vice presidential candidate “because she was hot and got ratings.”

According to one Republican who is close to the Fox News chairman, Palin certainly wasn’t hired because Ailes respected her intellect.

“He thinks Palin is an idiot,” the insider told New York magazine earlier this year. “He thinks she’s stupid. He helped boost her up. People like Sarah Palin haven’t elevated the conservative movement.”

2)Q&A with Palin Advisor-Turned-Novelist Nicolle Wallace

In the book, the vice presidential character, Tara Meyers, is completely unfit for her job.

The idea of a mentally ill vice president who suffers in complete isolation was obviously sparked by the behaviors I witnessed by Sarah Palin. What if somebody who was ill-equipped for the office were to ascend to the presidency or vice presidency? What would they do? How long would it take for people to figure it out? I became consumed by this question. *

Linking these stories together might seem like a bit of a Palin pile-on, but the point that I wanted to stress is that defenders of Sarah Palin seem to feel as though there is a conspiracy afoot to wreck Palin in some way, as if she's a unique victim of the left-leaning gotcha media and radical bloggers.  A former aide indicates that she loved "to play the victim.". But she doesn't seem to be the blameless victim of people who don't even know her and are just attacking her for partisan reasons.  Many of the people who end up harsh critics of Palin are people who have managed to take a long hard look at her--some of them from quite close up. This is a bad sign.

Roger Ailes has always been a GOP partisan, and for all I know, he may be some kind of massive sexist pig--but his comment regarding her simply being "hot and (getting ratings)" conveys a lot of disrespect.  Nicole Wallace worked on the 2008 McCain/Palin campaign--and she is basically saying that she believes that Palin is not actually stable.  A former aide, Frank Bailey, co-wrote a book about Palin's lack of fitness for office.    It all starts looking like the people who start to become most critical of her (see Andrew Halcro or Lyda Green) have actually met her and worked with her. And when she is done with people, she doesn't just seem to burn bridges--she burns tollbooths and roads.

I'm bringing all this up because even though her announcing that she will not run should end her political aspirations--I doubt it will end her influence, unless those last handful of dead-enders stop seeing star bursts, and start seeing the erstwhile Candidate Palin with her flaws uncovered.

.* A bit of a digression on Wallace's accusations however--I find them unfair. Although she may have observed behavior from Palin that she considered out of the ordinary, this doesn't put her in a position to diagnose to presume to know someone else's actual mental fitness.  That she saw enough of Palin to dislike in particularly this way, however, does seem interesting to me.