Palin's Balin': Sarah Quits

The 2008 Republican candidate for vice-president, Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin, announced July 3 that she will resign from office on July 26, 2009, and “return to private life.” This was a shocking announcement coming from the high-profile Governor, considering that she still had nearly eighteen months left in her first term.

At this point it is unclear what the Governor’s real motives might be, but already many commentators on both sides of the political spectrum have expressed their opinion that Palin may have “committed political suicide.”

Palin, 45, continues to be a major GOP celebrity and has been considered one of the leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Her decision not to run for reelection as Alaska’s governor in 2010, combined with her announcement that she would not serve out the rest of her term, was seen by some conservative Republicans as the hammer that would drive nails into her political coffin.

Sarah Palin’s resignation announcement

At this point it is too early to know the true motivation behind Palin’s latest quirky decision. She may have felt battered by her recent feud with TV late night comedian David Letterman. Her complaints centered around his admittedly distasteful jokes about her daughter and NY Yankee star Alex Rodriguez. Letterman later apologized on air and said that he regretted using the jokes.

She may have also felt betrayed by Republican running mate John McCain’s campaign staffers (along with a few of her own) that shared the dirt with Vanity Fair magazine’s writer Todd Purdom about the infighting and backbiting that went on during her failed 2008 presidential campaign. The Vanity Fair article appears in the August 2009 issue (now on the newsstands) and can also be viewed at VF.com.

It was clear that many Republican strategists were not happy with the choice of Palin as McCain’s running mate. Many felt that she was too inexperienced, carried too much political baggage (considering the short time that she was Alaska’s governor), and simply did not have the political savvy to be an effective and credible candidate.

The counter-balance was Palin’s support among the most conservative and religious members of the Republican base, surprising even to the party’s own pollsters. Her Midwestern style and evangelical Protestant religious leanings immediately attracted the southern wing of the GOP. Her connection with the campaign also balanced out Senator McCain’s weak support among the most conservative members of the party, and pulled in the former supporters of the openly religious Governor Mike Huckabee.

On the surface, Palin seemed to be a perfect choice. She was a woman, a conservative, and a church-going, gun-toting, America First! anti-Socialist hottie! When she joined the campaign, the approval numbers for the Republican ticket soared and immediately took the lead in the national campaign – for about two weeks.

Unfortunately, every time Sarah Palin opened her mouth during a TV interview, she managed to show how uneducated and unsophisticated she really was. GOP campaign numbers began to slide and never recovered. At one point there were rumors that Palin would be allowed to resign from the campaign. ["Will Sarah Palin drop out?"]

After the November election, Palin’s supporters and Republican Party leaders felt that she should go back to Alaska, be a good governor, stay out of trouble, and take the time available to school herself on effective national campaigning, and try to find a way to spread her appeal across a broader voter spectrum.

Palin has done none of this, continuing to constantly issue negative comments on Obama’s initiatives, rejecting needed federal stimulus dollars (and then accepting them) for her state, and generally acting the “spoiled little brat up north.”

Palin supposedly has a book deal worth several million dollars working in the wings. Apparently she has chosen a writer at the conservative Christian World magazine to be her co-author of her memoir. She might feel that publishing a book and then appearing on TV and going on book tours might give her more exposure than hanging out at the Governor’s mansion in Juneau.

So maybe we haven’t heard the last of Sarah Palin. Maybe this really is the beginning of a new road for her. We wish her success in whatever she decides to do and hope her book provides her with the retirement money she’ll need for the next seven years. We’d suggest however, that she spend a lot of time practicing TV interviews before actually going on the road. If she is serious about ever being a political candidate in the near future she’s going to need to fine-tune her technique.