From Steve Kornacki at Salon:
The White House campaign ruse ends. If only the myth would too
There are, believe it or not, a few people who seem genuinely surprised by Sarah Palin’s announcement last night that she won’t run for president in 2012.
Reading through the comments section at the online hub for grass-roots Palin activity calls to mind the sorts of exchanges that presumably occurred between Harold Camping’s devotees and their skeptical friends and family members when May 21 came and went. “I can not believe she make all this hype ABOUT NOTHING!!!! She’s in it for the money and I got played!!!” one commenter wrote, while another declared: “Ok People! LISTEN UP!!!!!!!!!! I have been saying for months and months that Palin never even considered running for president.”
The latter take, of course is probably about right. Maybe in the immediate wake of the 2008 election, from which Palin emerged with a (slightly) net favorable score in national polls, she seriously entertained notions of a triumphant campaign for the top job in ’12. But from that point on, virtually everything she said and did turned swing voters against her and alienated her own party.
In the year 2010 alone, the number of Republican voters who said they’d be willing to support Palin for president dropped by 20 points; no other prospective candidate took a hit like that. […] Today, her favorable rating with Republican voters stands at 44 percent, and with all voters it’s just 22 percent.
This is why it was so hard to take her periodic threats to wage a ’12 campaign seriously.
…snip…
I wrote a while back that anyone sick of all the press attention Palin continued to receive should hope she decided to run. Why? Because if she put her name on the ballot and finished as an asterisk, it would prove once and for all that the empress had no clothes, and that there was no point in continuing to treat her as an unusually important and influential political leader.
…snip…
[B]y opting not to run, Palin can keep the illusion alive. Within minutes of issuing her written statement last night, she called in to Mark Levin’s radio show, telling the conservative host that concern for her family played a major role in her decision and vowing to take an active role in the 2012 election at the presidential, congressional and gubernatorial levels. Which, of course, means that instead of ending with her announcement, speculation about Palin will now simply evolve. Look for a parade of stories in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses about which candidate she might support. And look for Palin, just as she did with her White House charade, to milk the interest for all it’s worth, setting herself up as a would-be kingmaker (or queenmaker). Nor will the speculation stop when the primaries are over. Then there will be a new question: What role will she play at the convention — and can [nominee’s name here] risk offending Palin’s army by snubbing her? And it will continue like this through the fall, when we’ll hear all about the potentially crucial role Palin could play in firing up the conservative base — or is the GOP nominee afraid that deploying her will alienate swing voters?
And really, that’s just the beginning. November 2012 will come and go, but she’ll still be around. As Ed Kilgore noted last night, she’s still only 47 years old — which means that there will be six more presidential elections after 2012 before she’s as old as John McCain was in 2008. If she’d decided to run now, Palin might have been out of our lives within a few months. Instead, she’ll be with us for years and years to come.
I’m not so sure. I think a lot of her supporters will be pissed off that she didn’t run. Let’s face it–if you’re dumb enough to support that asswipe in the first place and actually give her your hard-earned money, then you were probably too dumb to realize that you were being duped the entire time. However, I think they finally got a glimpse behind the curtain, and they realized that this was a money-making ruse the entire time. Sure, there will be a handful of true believers who must continue to believe, because if they no longer believe, their mental house of cards will collapse. I think that, just like the Teabaggers, Princess’s fan club will have the same numbers of that of an American Idol contestant who came in 6th. In addition, Princess isn’t getting any younger. There will be someone along to replace her, and Faux News won’t be banging down her door to renew her contract. I don’t think they’ve gotten much bang for their buck so far, and I don’t think they’ll be inclined to throw good money after bad. She’ll show up every once in a while in a “Where are they now?” story, but I think this is, as I said in the title, the end of an error. We can only hope.
She will stay in the limelight enough to pump future book sales. Besides, the media will be there to cover whatever she does. So she will continue to milk the money train.
I need a closer look to see the neck charms. But hey, the Bens in her cleavage is an interesting look.
i think the bloom is off the rose, and she won’t be around much. the media has a very short attention span. herman ‘herb’ cain is the new princess sarah. this week anyway.
the neck charms are just an assortment of tea-related charms.
The devil tail fits…she’s the poster girl for vanity and greed. She’s gonna miss all the attention. I bet she has a few media spasms in the months ahead.
notice that she waited for moby christie to announce that he wasn’t going to run before she made her announcement. she thought that every newspaper and every news show would lead with the big news. too bad for her (because it’s all about her) that steve jobs died on the same day.
Now I could see her banning Apple from her family because of this. 😆
She must have been livid to see all the coverage and tributes Jobs got.
and all she got on most stations was a sentence or 2. then they’d remind everyone that moby christie dropped out.
unless it would keep her away from twitter. she could never give that up. for that matter, she couldn’t live without googling herself every 5 minutes either.
My only regret is she never came by me. I always wanted a bus like that, and as I said to Frank, there’s plenty of places around here the whole Palin clan could disappear … permanently!
we have plenty of swampland around here, john. i think that might be more fitting for the palin clan.
The horror is that she can still decide to run.She’s been lying all the way up to now,so why trust her on this.When it comes to Palin,I am very pessimistic,and for good reasons.
she’s toast. there’s no way of her getting into the race without jeopardizing her paycheck over at faux news. that’s easy money, so she’d never give that up. that said, i wouldn’t be in the least surprised if faux news dumps her as soon as her contract is up. maybe she can work for glenn blechhh.
Why would she run for president — a demanding position with endless responsibilities — when she can continue to live an easy life on the gravy train? As I recall, her last job with governmental responsibilities wasn’t to her liking . . .
You talkin’ bout her half-term governership? LOL.
Bye Sarah. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
everything she does is half-assed, so it’s fitting that she was only a half-term governor.
she doesn’t want any job in which she’d have to do any actual work. she doesn’t even go into the faux news studio. she just has someone slap a ton of makeup on her and do her hair, and then she repeats something she read on twitter. i bet she still has her pajamas and slippers on when she makes her appearances.
I hope you’re right. I will never forgive John McCain for being so cynical that he could thrust such an unintelligent, self-serving, poser off on us just to win. It’s as if he gambled our future with this choice. Shame on him and don’t let the door hit when you leave, Sarah.
hello etomczyk,
welcome to the raisin! 😀
i will never forgive capt underpants either, and i suspect that he’s not very happy with whoever it was that convinced him that she would be the best choice for veep. as soon as brisket showed up pregnant, he had to have known that he had made a huge mistake. i hope that keeps him up at night, and i hope that he knows that she is his legacy.
i was just over at your blog, and i loved death’s interview. i left a comment over there. i hope the raisinettes will click over, because i think they’ll enjoy it as much as i did.
hope you’ll visit again soon. 🙂
Nonnie, I’ve meant to pop over here for a while and tell you something. Among my “other” blog family (complete with a lady I refer to as “Melissa on Valium” 😉 ), there’s a lady who writes about her kids and the outrageous things they say. One kid made some commentary about wearing underwear for days on end, and she referred to him as “Captain Underpants”.
I hate you. I spewed tea, requiring over a half-hour cleanup, and I just couldn’t bring myself to explain why it took me 45 minutes to get back to her. I hate you. :p 😀
😆 that’s too funny! as fdr said, i welcome your hate! 😛
p.s. i dearly hope that the child bears no resemblance to grampa walnuts.
I like it!
so, jeffeleh™, this is what it takes to get you over here? glad you liked it. 😀
Conservatives4Palin (C4P) is a nest of kookery. They’re even loonier than their idol. As for Princess, good riddance!
even loonies can figure out that they’ve been ripped off. i suspect that a lot of princess fans will move on to someone else. maybe herb.
More likely BBB. There are some things “Herb” can’t do for Princess’s followers that BBB can. Then again, so can Nikki Haley. I wonder how many of Princess’s fans will latch onto her as the most attractive sitting female governor?
i don’t think it will be bbb. i think that they probably looked at bbb as competition for princess and resented her. they wanted princess to be the most popular, and they probably thought that bbb had a lot of nerve even getting into the race and overshadowing princess.
And there she will sit, waitng in her little TV broadcast nook at the mansion that looks like a firehouse, waiting…waiting! Toad will dress in formal butler attire and reasure her that that phone WILL ring….”I’m ready for my close-up Mr. Ailes”… but, alas, it never will….unless the dog and pony show is as big a cockup as 08 and her name gets tossed in and she wins by proclamation. Can’t you just see her now, entering Martin Short style and saying “my people have spoken”…you know it could happen!
wasilla boulevard!
i ambig. it’s politics that got small.
The only surprise here is her timing. I thought she still had a few more weeks to milk this while a slobbering press lapped up her every wink-and-nod. With Christie’s formal no – on top of all of his previous no’s – and the bloom off of Ponzi and Batshit, she could have held the spotlight on her own. The press is bored and the Godfather is OK for some funny stories but she could have had it all for a few more weeks before she had to commit. Instead, she did what she does best. She quit.
she went past the date when she originally said she would give her answer. i don’t think she could have stretched it out any longer. the media was losing interest. i bet she was really pissed that steve jobs had the nerve to die on the day that she made her big announcement and stole all the headlines. one more thing for which to be grateful to steve jobs.
She isn’t going away. She had a taste of fame and fortune and now she’s addicted. Her crack is attention and she’ll continue to need a fix – and there will be plenty of fans to keep her in the public eye. I don’t believe she’ll be that influential in politics, however, because she’ll be easily replaced by other mouthpieces.
i think she will be going away, but kicking and screaming. what is she going to do? rent another bus and take her props…i mean, kids on vacation? there will be a new flavor of the month along soon, and princess will be setting her hair on fire in order to get a tv camera on her.
Sarah Palin was always just a cheap whore….. she just ran out of folks willing to pay for a lip-stick blow job.
amd her pimp, faux news, will be looking for younger and prettier model, and princess will be standing on the curb as cars drive through puddles and splash her as they pass by.
YES!! My inspired pin has now become a belt buckle. I’m taking over the world, one tacky accessory at a time.
i thought you’d like that, little spinny! 😀
The quotes from her website are great. Many exclamation points–always a sign of a thoughtful discussion!!!!!!!
And I love the teapot necklace!
this is even better. remember the guy who made the gushing movie about her? he’s a little disappointed! 😆
Ouch! How painful to have one of her supporters spelling out just how irrelevant she is going to become. Of course, he says he would have been equally angry if she *had* run — good to know Sarah’s followers are just as erratic in their behavior as she is…
i think it’s hilarious, especially after he shelled out so much money to make that piece of shit movie.
I should specify, painful to her, hilarious to me.
and to the shithead who made the movie! that makes it double good! 😀 😀
Do I have enough fingers for Palin’s days left at Fox news?
I’ve found I need only one finger for ANYTHING to do with Palin. I’ll let you guess which one….
i need 2, one on the left hand and one on the right. i switch from one to the other so they don’t get cramped.
peggy makes more sense that princess ever did.
My guess is she’ll come back in 6 months on the Shopping network.
😆 would she last through an entire commercial or quit halfway through?
😆
Sarah Who?
and more importantly, why? i hope capt underpants knows how despised he is for inflicting that worthless pile of narcissistic effluvium on the country and the world.