Ed Rollins:
The GOP really is in freefall. The governor most Republicans like and want to support is apparently dropping out of politics, and Mark Sanford remains in office despite scandal and disgrace. Though there is otherwise really nothing in common between them, Palin is every bit as finished politically on a national level as Sanford is ...
I keep seeing these odd Richard Nixon references in commentary on this resignation. As Alex Massie notes, Richard Nixon was already a fairly significant, well-established political figure by 1960. Just as important, he was the losing candidate in a close race in which he was the presidential candidate, and so far as I know Nixon never resigned from a major office before his term was up unless it was to take a more prestigious post. To make a Nixonian comeback, it might be helpful if Palin’s career were in any way comparable to Nixon’s.
The DNC:
Either Sarah Palin is leaving the people of Alaska high and dry to pursue her long shot national political ambitions or she simply can't handle the job now that her popularity has dimmed and oil revenues are down. Either way - her decision to abandon her post and the people of Alaska who elected her continues a pattern of bizarre behavior that more than anything else may explain the decision she made today.
Sarah Palin, as you may well have heard, is resigning as governor of Alaska later this month in order, reports The Post’s Chris Cillizza, to focus on a 2012 presidential bid. And, in one stroke, she reconfirms many of the reasons she will never be president.
First, the timing: It’s not just that there’s more time between now and the next presidential election than has yet elapsed since the last one. There’s more time between now and the next midterm election than has passed since last November. Perhaps never has a presidential hopeful so poorly disguised her overambition. Sure, it’s tough to campaign and govern a state so far away from Iowa. But she could have simply decided not to run for reelection next year. This makes her look incapable of juggling multiple tasks at once.Which points to a larger problem: judgment skills, or, rather, her questionable possession of such. From her disastrous campaign interviews to her self-aggrandized insistence that she speak on election night to her inability to decide whether or not to speak at GOP functions to her incompetence at handling the press to her gratuitous spat with David Letterman, she has demonstrated a volatile temperament and an incapability to think strategically. As John Weaver, a long-time McCainite, told The Post this afternoon: “We've seen a lot of nutty behavior from governors and Republican leaders in the last three months, but this one is at the top of that.”
All together, the picture is of a politician with obvious abilities to connect to ordinary folks -- but one who is also arrogant, unstable and unwise. Her latest move makes the image even clearer.
Josh Marshall's Meditation for the day:
John McCain and his shrewd judge of character.
I think the simple truth is that, as even Alaskan Republicans told us last September, she was far from able to be governor of Alaska, let alone vice-president of the United States. Once the klieglights hit, it was only a matter of time before she imploded or exploded or some gruesome combination of the two. The librul media will be blamed for everything on her inexorable path to becoming a Fox News celebrity. Maybe a reality show? Someone hire her for The View!
In the end, I think, the one thing to say is that the Republican party is in such a total state of collapse and incoherence that it actually believed she could be a future president; and that John McCain was so reckless, so cynical and so cavalier that he was prepared to rest the national security of this country on her shoulders if he, in his seventies, were to become unable to fulfill his duties or die. In some ways, this is a moment to reflect on McCain, and his irresponsibility, not Palin and her drama.
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