Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn’t the last election held in this country over on November 4, 2008? After that election the next national elections are not slated until 2010, correct? So could someone please, please tell me why there is such a furor over the losing vice presidential candidate from the last election!?! The way many on both sides of the political spectrum act, you would think that Sarah Palin was responsible for Global Warming, bitter beer face, and I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!

Somewhere along the campaign trail, people decided that Sarah Palin was the bane of the McCain campaign, the scourge if the Republican Party, and the least qualified vice presidential candidate ever…as if that mattered when she was on a ticket opposing the most radical, leftist, inexperienced presidential candidate EVER!!! Somehow the inexperience of Palin as veep overshadowed the inexperience of Obama, although one was running to remake the Republic in his image, while the other was trying to help a flawed warhorse ascend to the White House.

What was amazing was to hear the same attacks that the left launched, as was their place as the opposition, coming from people who ostensibly stood on the same side of the issues as Palin. The leadership of the GOP looked down on her with their studied patrician arrogance for many of the same reasons she was savaged from the left; she only went to a state school for college; she was from Alaska, for goodness sakes!; she had a veritable tribe of children; she was not polished enough for the national stage, and by God she could not best Katie Couric in an interview on CBS News! Take her to the guillotine and take off her political head, because she is finished as a political player in national politics for all time!

That was to be expected from the Republican leadership, which has always seen itself as an exclusive country club an only tolerates those not to the manor born out of the necessity of garnering their votes come election time. The country-clubbers have never had any real use for those conservatives not located along the Boston-DC-Manhattan corridor; they hated Nixon, they hated Reagan, and they only liked George Bush because he had the right bloodline to be a member in good standing. But what I never expected was to see the “rank and file” conservatives turn on Governor Palin the way she did, especially after she decided to resign as governor of Alaska.

When Palin stepped down, many in the rank and file exploded in anger. To them the move just seemed to confirm the bad things being said about the governor in the media; she was ‘erratic’, unpredictable, and just plain strange. Why, oh why, would she just quit on the people of Alaska? No reason that the governor cited was good enough to assuage their anger, even if they were not actually her constituents. Neither the frivolous ethics complaints, nor the massive FOIA requests, nor the vicious attacks on her family were reason enough for the governor to step down. No, it was somehow felt that she owed it to the state of Alaska, the people of America, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement to bear those slings and arrows, no matter how much they impeded her ability to govern, or how personally hurtful the attacks on her family were. And when Governor Palin decided that she had a responsibility to do right by her family first and foremost, and that meant stepping down as governor, she became persona non grata to many people who had supported her in the presidential campaign.

Then came the insistence that resigning as governor meant that Sarah Palin was doomed as a political entity for all time; why the anti-Palin commercials calling her a quitter were already being written. Yet for someone that is a political non-entity, there is certainly a great deal of attention paid to her. If she were so politically radioactive, why do there continue to be hit pieces written about her**cough**Kathleen Parker and Peggy Noonan**cough**? If she’s so over, why does anyone care what she has to say about the current healthcare debate? I mean, she is finished…right?

People constantly come back to one theme with Sarah Palin that I would like to take a little time to address. One of the things people both left and right ask about Governor Palin is, “Why do you like her?” According to many she is just…well…simple. She isn’t polished like most people in politics; she doesn’t come off like she knows everything, and she doesn’t seem like the usual professional office seeker. And those are just the qualities that draw so many people to her. She is a genuine person, not a prepackaged product that is sold to us at election time. She has faults that she doesn’t spend her whole life attempting to cover up; she makes mistakes; she gets knocked around and pulls herself together, and she stands by what she believes in no matter the political costs. People like that about her; heck, I like that about her. In a world where politicians are commodities to be sold to potential voters, Sarah Palin stands out as different type of politician; namely the kind that doesn’t need to be in the political spotlight to be happy. Nowadays that is truly a rarity, and many people appreciate that about her.

None of knows what the future holds for Sarah Palin as a political player, and I’m not going to speculate about it. But I wouldn’t write her political epitaph quite yet; you never know what Sarah from Wasilla has in store for the future!

The responses from the press and the political pundits were immediate and very predictable. Her media enemies, from Maureen Dowd to Kathleen Parker, all pronounced her to be “erratic”, a “quitter”, and her actions confirmed to them that she was not ready for the political spotlight. Why, if she cannot stay the course for the last sixteen to eighteen months as governor, how can she run for president? If she cannot take the media heat while safely ensconced in the ultimate flyover state in Alaska, then she will never be able to handle another national campaign. Why, there had to be some other deep, dark secret reason for her to resign; an affair or an FBI investigation being the most likely reasons. But whatever the reasons, Palin was officially dead as a national political figure. There is no way that she could mount a presidential campaign in 2012, and her “bizarre” behavior would likely preclude her from even attempting a run in 2016. The pundits could already see the anti-Palin campaign commercials, “If she could not be trusted to stick with her constituents in Alaska, how can she trusted to stick with the presidency?”

The thing that has struck me about all of the blathering about Palin’s future is how much of it centers on politics and completely discounts the idea that Gov. Palin was being honest about her reasons for stepping down. The reactions by the media and punditry are exactly what one would expect from people who are totally wrapped up in the Washington-Manhattan elite bubble; people who are unable to view any event apart from the usual political considerations. And we the people sit and listen to them, take their ideas to heart, and view things from a purely political prism. The problem is that we have all become political cynics, expecting everyone that holds a political position to be a professional politician.

That is the thing that has flummoxed the Left, and some on the Right, from the start about Sarah Palin, and it is why her explanations for her resignation have been roundly been dismissed by all the political ‘experts’ out there. Sarah Palin is something we all claim to want from our political leaders, yet when we get it we rebel against it; she is a citizen who is involved in politics, not a person who is consumed by political ambition. Look at her reasoning and the facts behind them; Palin has faced over 18 ethical complaints since 2008, the vast majority of them after her selection as John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election. Of the 18 complaints, 1 has been settled with a reimbursement to the state for the travel expenses of the Palin children when the governor traveled, two are still pending, and 15 have been dismissed. (See the full list at http://www.adn.com/palin/story/838912.html) These complaints have cost the state $300,000 dollars and have cost the Palin family $500,000; not to mention the time and expense involved in the time state workers have to put in to answer the charges. And since the end of the 2008 presidential campaign there have been 150 Freedom of Information Act requests; according to a Wall Street Journal article by John Fund (see it at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124700261179807839.html). And do not forget that every one of the FOIA requests, by law, must be answered by a date certain. And who can forget the crass ‘joke’ by David Letterman about her teenaged daughter Willow…which he claimed was meant for her other teenaged daughter Bristol? Or the jokes made at the expense of her youngest son Trig, who was born with Down’s syndrome? Is it so hard to believe that such pressures would not make leaving the governor’s office behind a viable option for someone who is not totally invested in political success?

The reason that we are so unwilling to believe that Palin is lying about her reasons for leaving, or that she is somehow betraying the GOP is that we have become, as I stated earlier, political cynics. We have become accustomed to a political class in this country that eats, sleeps, and breathes only for the chance to gather political power into their hands. We are accustomed to a political class that goes to all the right schools (Harvard, Yale, Brown, Wellesley), takes all the right classes (political science and law), and trains to work the levers of the federal bureaucracy. Not only have we grown accustomed to it, we have embraced it and reject nearly anyone who is different from the accepted norms of political behavior.

We claim to want elected officials that aspire to serve the public good, but we continue to vote for officials that only care about their next election. We claim to want officials who can look honestly at their service and will step away when they are doing more harm than good, but we elect people who can only have their hands taken off the levers of power if you chop their fingers off! We keep sending people to Congress, the state house, or the governor’s mansion that cannot imagine a time when they were not in elected office, and would damned near die if they lost an election. They have become a political oligarchy that we willingly prop up, while tearing down anyone that goes against that grain.

You see, the real story of the Palin resignation is not found in her reasoning, her timing, or her political future. The real story is how we all reacted to a person that decided that political office was not what was best for her and her family and actually made a decision that was in their best interests and not one that was made with an eye towards the next political goal to be reached. She explained why she did what she did, yet we were unable to accept it at face value. The story was never Palin, it was always us and how we have succumbed to the prevailing political cynicism.

Maybe Sarah Palin had it right when she decided to resign, but we have it wrong in reacting to it as purely a political event. Our reaction to her decision says more about us than the original decision says about Mrs. Palin.