Oh, you betcha!
FROM: Mark Halperin
TO: Coastal Elites, the Media and Establishment Politicians of Both Parties
RE: Sarah Heath Palin
Don’t underestimate Sarah Palin. Yes, she is hyper-polarizing: she sends her fans into rapture and drives her detractors stark raving mad. But she can dominate the news cycle with a single tweet and generate three days of coverage with a single speech (as she did this past Friday in Iowa). Her name recognition is universal.
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But the mistake you are making is to assume that Palin needs or wants to play by the standard rules of American politics. Or that it even occurs to her to do so. Trash her all you want (even you Republicans who are doing it all the time behind her back) for being uninformed, demagogic and incoherent, and brandish the poll numbers that show fewer and fewer Americans think she is qualified to be President. Strain to apply political and practical norms to Alaska’s former governor. You are missing the point.
[…]
But ask yourself why Palin was in Iowa this of all weekends. Remember that she herself negotiated the date for the Iowa Republican Party’s annual Ronald Reagan dinner. This allowed her to conveniently skip the Values Voter Summit simultaneously going on in Washington, where most of the other potential 2012 Republican candidates appeared. By choosing Iowa over Washington, Palin avoided having to compete head to head with her would-be rivals and dodged the event’s concluding straw poll. Meanwhile, Palin got more weekend coverage than all the other prospects combined. Not everything she has done thus far has been obviously calculated, but her choices overall have been too savvy to be coincidence or luck.
The past 22 months have been replete with situations in which Palin has refused to adhere to the conventional playbook of presidential contenders and party honchos.
[…]
Palin is operating on a different plane, hovering higher than a mere celebrity, more buoyant than an average politician.
[…]
She is like Obama: the camera loves her and both sides of the political spectrum hang on her every word. She is like Bush: able to communicate with religious conservatives and Middle Americans. Most of all, she is like Bill Clinton: what doesn’t kill Sarah Palin makes her stronger. So as the world gets ready for the midterm elections and for the start of the epic contest in which Republicans will pick their champion to go into battle against Barack Obama, be advised: Palin is very much alive and, despite what you think, extraordinarily strong.
Yep. Love her or hate her, just don’t misunderestimate her. While the rest of the GOP hopefuls are kissing ass and begging for money, she’s kicking ass and taking names.
The Wall Street Journal:
A new comprehensive national survey shows that independent voters—who voted for Barack Obama by a 52%-to-44% margin in the 2008 presidential election—are now moving strongly in the direction of the Republican Party. The survey, conducted by Douglas E. Schoen LLC on behalf of Independent Women’s Voice in late August, raises the possibility of a fundamental realignment of independent voters and the dominance of a more conservative electorate.
Today, independents say they lean more toward the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, 50% to 25%, and that the Republican Party is closer to their views by 52% to 30%. This movement comes in spite of independents’ generally negative views of the GOP—a majority of independents (54%) view the Republicans unfavorably, compared to 39% who have a favorable impression. (The poll also revealed that 48% of independents were either “sympathetic to or supporters of the tea party.”)
Men say they are going to vote for the Republican candidate rather than the Democratic candidate in their district by a margin of 45 percent to 32 percent. The numbers are nearly reversed for women with 36 percent saying they will vote Republican and 43 percent saying they will vote Democratic.
Ever since 1980, when Ronald Reagan inspired more men than women, the difference in the way the sexes vote has been a critical part of American politics. Women have been more likely than men to favor Democratic candidates, an advantage Democrats have come to count on. Women also historically outnumber men when it comes to showing up at the polls.
But this year may be different. Even though women are still more likely to vote Democratic, the poll suggests they may stay home this year, giving more of the decision-making to men by default.
So far in this election, women are not nearly as attentive as men and express less enthusiasm about voting, the poll found. Men are more likely than women to fall into the category of voters who say they are paying a lot of attention to the campaign right now. They are also more likely than women to say they are more enthusiastic about voting in this congressional election than they remember being in past mid-terms elections.
The poll suggests that men are angrier than women, and that their anger may be more motivating than the sense of hopelessness expressed by women, particularly on economic issues.
Cue Mama Grizzly with a “conservative feminist” platform:
Filed under: 2010 Elections, 2012 Election, General, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin | 263 Comments »
The Confluence 