Posts Tagged ‘sarah palin 2012 campaign’
“Maybe it’ll be great, maybe it’ll be crap”: Kevin Drum in Mother Jones re THE ROGUE
July 23, 2011
Kevin Drum says THE ROGUE “may rekindle a momentary, if unflattering, last hurrah for Palin.”
I remember Kevin from when he started blogging as Calpundit back in 2003. He’s always thoughtful and sometimes entertaining: there could be worse epitaphs for any of us.
So I’d like to assure him that while others will decide whether THE ROGUE is “great,” it’s not “crap.”
Must all books be either/or?
Kevin can decide for himself in September, but I’d also issue a friendly warning: don’t fall into the conventional wisdom trap.
It’s all too easy right now to say that Sarah is finished.
How many times have we heard this before?
Do you really think she’s not preparing a late summer/fall p.r. blitz?
Do you really think her ego, and her “mantling” and “annointing” by her God will allow her to just fade silently into our memories?
I’m still inclined to think she’ll announce that she’s running for president.
Of course, she might wait until September and then announce that she’s not running, in the hope that such an announcement will reduce interest in and publicity for THE ROGUE.
No, I don’t really think Sarah has made me her top priority as she plans her future, but I know that she’d like to hurt me in any way she can.
And I’m ready for that, whatever form it takes.
Personal to Kevin: let me know what you think when you read THE ROGUE. Better yet, let all Mother Jones readers know.
Posted in 2012, Joe McGinniss, Sarah Palin, The Rogue | 
Tags: kevin drum, mother jones, sarah palin 2012 campaign | 
24 Comments »
Bachmann Overdrive Leaves Sarah in Dust UPDATE:// UK bookies say Bachmann twice as likely as Palin to win 2012
July 5, 2011
As The New York Times reports, Michele Bachmann electrified a July Fourth crowd in Clear Lake, Iowa yesterday.
The excitement surrounding Mrs. Bachmann rivaled the attention paid to most candidates in recent years, including in 2007 when Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived with her husband in tow…One week after Mrs. Bachmann declared her candidacy in Iowa, where she lived until age 12, her campaign has swept through New Hampshire and South Carolina, drawing bigger crowds than any of her Republican rivals.
A year ago, I’m sure Sarah Palin supporters would have envisioned the exact same scene, but with Sarah as the center of attention.
It was not to be. All Sarah could muster for the holiday was a typically stale, banal tweet:
“Let Freedom Ring! Happy Independence Day… thank God for America, thank God for our troops.”
Sarah may still be asking herself, “To be or not to be?” but the answer matters less with each passing day.
The GOP circus train has moved on, leaving Sarah stranded at the Wasilla depot with nobody even caring any more.
UPDATE: The UK betting agency, William Hill, which is seeking approval to take presidential bets in Las Vegas next year, has posted their current odds on the 2012 race. Why is the chart below a valuable guide to what’s actually likely to happen, as opposed to what partisans hope for? Because William Hill couldn’t care less who wins. As long as they adjust their odds to stay ahead of the curve, they make their profit regardless of the outcome. Thus, their take on 2012 is something hard to find in U.S. media and on blogs: expert and dispassionate.
William Hill odds don’t differ significantly from those recently offered by Ladbrokes, which I posted here, but they are more current.
Take a look:
| Next US President
|
|
|---|---|
|
4/9
Barack Obama
|
6/1
Mitt Romney
|
|
8/1
Tim Pawlenty
|
12/1
Rick Perry
|
|
14/1
Michele Bachmann
|
18/1
Jon Huntsman
|
|
28/1
Sarah Palin
|
40/1
Ron Paul
|
|
40/1
Marco Rubio
|
50/1
Hilary Clinton
|
|
50/1
Joe Biden
|
50/1
Rudy Giuliani
|
|
50/1
Rick Santorum
|
50/1
Herman Cain
|
|
66/1
Newt Gingrich
|
100/1
Jeb Bush
|
|
500/1
Randall Terry
|
|
Bachmann at 14/1 offers only half the reward that a bet on Sarah at 28/1 would return–the surest sign yet that God has grown tired of holding open the door.
Of course, Obama at 4/9 suggests that a bet on any Republican would be putting “trickle-up” economics into action (i.e. your money will trickle up into William Hill’s already bloated coffers.)
p.s. William Hill offering 9/4 on Brazil to win the Copa America (South American championship) currently being played in Argentina. Having watched all first-round matches (Univision/Telefutura have great HD broadcasts) I’m tempted…also tempted by the 10/1 currently offered on Brazil’s Pato to wind up as individual high scorer.
But not at all tempted by 28-1 on Sarah What’s-her-name.
FULL DISCLOSURE: In 1999, The Miracle of Castel di Sangro was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. In the end, the award went to a bedridden “septuagenarian knight” for his social history of English cricket. I congratulated Sir Derek by telephone soon after the presentation. He was utterly charming and I’m glad his final days were brightened by the award.
Anyway, how’s a Yank named Joe gonna beat out a septuagenarian knight for a London book prize?
The William Hill people made the awards ceremony a splendid event, and as second prize I received a £750 credit to the new wagering account they established for me. No need to tell you how long it took me to run through that!
Posted in 2012, Joe McGinniss, michelle bachmann, right wing, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, The Rogue, Wasilla | Tags: 2012 gop candidates, bachman turner overdrive, brazil, circus, copa america, cricket, iowa primary, July 4th, london, new hampshire, pato, sarah palin 2012 campaign, south carolina, telefutura, train station, univision, william hill | 42 Comments »
Will She, Won’t She? WSJ readers don’t know
July 2, 2011
HOW better to get through a slow news three-day weekend than take a poll?
The Wall Street Journal figured why not ask readers if they think Sarah Palin will run for president.
Seems that the first three thousand respondents are almost evenly divided: 52 percent say yes, 48 percent say no.
Anybody who wants to can weigh in here:
Vote early and often. It’s free.
Posted in 2012, Joe McGinniss, Sarah Palin, The Rogue | Tags: sarah palin 2012 campaign, wall street journal | 42 Comments »
Sarah’s Decision Coming Soon? Not likely.
June 17, 2011
The NYTimes summarizes todays non-story here.
In short, The American Spectator wrote that Sarah would announce her decision within a week or so.
Sarah promptly tweeted thusly:
“Really? Hmm, guess they forgot to inform me what I’m ‘expected to do’ next wk…”
The latest I’ve heard from sources I consider both reliable and informed is that Sarah will drag out whatever suspense there is as long as possible.
She’ll go to Sudan, possibly to Israel in August for a Glenn Beck rally, and do two more legs of her bus tour, all the while delaying her announcement.
Unless of course she gets into a bad mood and cancels any or all of the above. (Her history of extreme mood swings is something I pay considerable attention to in THE ROGUE.)
In the end, my best sources tell me, she won’t run. All the skeletons in her many closets are begging her not to, and she’ll listen to them.
She’s afraid. She’s just plain scared of what might happen if mainstream media finally decides that the honeymoon is over and starts to dig. If she runs, they will, this time. If she doesn’t, why bother?
She also lacks the organizational ability to build the complex structure that a presidential campaign would require, and she doesn’t trust anyone enough to let a professional take over. Remember, in 2008, McCain just plugged her into an operation that was already in high gear, and even that didn’t work out.
Also, she’s not really committed to any cause except herself.
HOWEVER…I was told a month ago that the one factor that could change all the above would be the sudden emergence of Michelle Bachmann as the “new” Sarah Palin. Sarah’s ego would not allow her to stay on the sidelines and watch Bachmann take the center stage that Sarah feels belongs to her.
And that’s exactly what’s happened in the past few weeks. Bachmann is this month’s media darling. If that lasts through Labor Day, Sarah might have to take the plunge.
I’ve always thought she would run. I still think so. But people who know more than I do tell me she won’t.
Bottom line for now: expect the tease to continue until Sarah has sucked the last egg out of the golden goose.
CBS political correspondent: “Sarah Palin is either running for President or she should be” UPDATE//Chris Wallace chimes in
June 5, 2011
I see from the comments here and at my Facebook page that some people think I’m only pretending to take Sarah semi-seriously in order to hype advance sales of THE ROGUE.
Listen, folks, I’m not makin’ stuff up.
A photo of Sarah waving from the back of a Harley took up the entire top of the front page of The New York Times “News of the Week in Review” section today.
Also today, CBS political correspondent Jan Crawford posted a piece on the CBS News website under the headline: “Palin: Is ‘The Undefeated’ Running for President?”
Crawford’s piece is essentially a rave review of the forthcoming two-hour feature film, “The Undefeated,” produced with his own money by an independently wealthy Palin supporter.
The film, which Crawford has seen, left her with “the distinct impression [Sarah’s] presidential candidacy is not only possible, but inevitable.”
She writes, “Regardless of where you come down [about Palin], here’s one thing both sides should agree on: it certainly looks like Palin is running for President.”
Go ahead, call Crawford a Kool-Aid drinking right-wing shill. And remind yourselves again that Sarah is just too stupid, or too greedy, or about to be engulfed by too many scandals to mount a serious campaign for the Republican nomination next year.
But Crawford’s piece was published today by CBS, not C4P.
The bus tour? The movie? The move to Arizona? Can you not hold a finger to the wind and feel the breeze?
As I said to a commenter on my Facebook page, just wishing she’d go away–or pretending she already has–won’t make it so.
UPDATE:
Chris Wallace, who interviewed Sarah on Fox today, later said this:
I’ve interviewed her a bunch of times now over the past two years, and I have never seen her as good, as impressive, I mean she’s always been an entertaining interview, but I have never seen her as good, as specific as she was, whether it was the debt or the state of the economy, or the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. I don’t think any fair minded person could look at that debate and not say that she is potentially a serious candidate for President of the United States. Now that doesn’t mean she’s gonna run, but this is the first time that I looked at her and I thought, she could be real player in a 2012 election.
Poor Piper No Better Today//UPDATE: Piper Photo Album of “My Summer Vacation?”
June 2, 2011
UPDATE:
Someone could–thus no doubt will–soon post an album of all “Pouty Piper” photos from this latest example of Sarah’s willful mistreatment of the very children about whose privacy she expressed such concern last summer, when I moved in next door.
I hope this photo will be included:
Is that, “I pledge allegiance,” or “Mommy, I’m feeling sick again?”
(By the way, don’t miss that clown in the back with a Statu(t)e of Liberty crown on his head: a stereotypical, not to say archetypal Palin supporter.)
Having a granddaughter Piper’s age, I not only sympathize, but empathize.
I also can’t help but be reminded of Sarah’s faux-outrage about me a year ago, as she swung into mama grisly mode on the Glenn Beck show.
In regard to my having become her summer neighbor, Beck asked Sarah:
“Do you feel, as a woman, do you feel violated?”
She said:
“I feel more protective than ever in terms of my kids. Any mom would. Just wantin’ to bring your family even closer and wrap your arms around ‘em and not let the infringement on their rights and privacy be so overwhelming…”
Well, hell of a job this year, Sarah, protecting Piper’s “rights and privacy,” upon which, incidentally I never infringed in the least.
Scenes like the above make me all the more eager for Sept. 20 and publication of THE ROGUE, when I’ll finally blow the lid off this whole Sarah-as-AnyMom sham, not to mention a number of others.
Posted in 2012, Fox, glenn beck, Joe McGinniss, Palin children, Sarah Palin, The Rogue, Trig Palin | Tags: child abuse, grandchildren, right to privacy, sarah palin 2012 campaign, statue of liberty | 80 Comments »
Sarah Palin and The Seven Dwarfs: Clear-eyed view from across the pond//UPDATE: sending a message?
May 30, 2011
I often think that Beltway pundits are so close to the screen that they can’t see the picture for the pixels.
And once they reach a collective opinion (i.e. the conventional wisdom from mid-January to April that Sarah’s disastrous plunge into the pool of Narcissus following the Tucson shootings of January 8 had finished her as a force in American politics), they cling to it the way Obama said that embittered poor whites in Appalachia and the Rust Belt “cling to guns or religion.”
Granted, Richard Adams works in The Guardian‘s Washington bureau, which puts him technically inside the Beltway.
Coming from England, however, he’s also a foreign correspondent and thus–unlike the blind men in the Indian fable— able to see the whole elephant. 
In today’s Guardian, Adams points out that there are two strong indicators that Palin will run for president: “everything she says and everything she does.”
Including the fact that her bus tour will take her to New Hampshire this week and to Iowa next month.
You can’t hardly get much more definitive than that.
As Adams writes:
Palin would be crazy not to run for the Republican nomination. Just look at the rest of the field.
UPDATE:
Nothing subtle about this:
Posted in 2012, evangelical, Joe McGinniss, mainstream media, Obama, Palin racism, right wing, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, The Rogue | Tags: 2012 gop candidates, 2012 primaries, dwarfism, dwarfs, dwarves, elephants. blind men, fundamentalist christian, GOP, iowa, narcissus, new hampshire, religious right, richard adams, sarah palin 2012 campaign, the guardian | 44 Comments »
Honestly now…//UPDATE: New neighbors offer advice via NYTimes
May 27, 2011
…if you had the choice of spending the summer on an air-conditioned bus (or, more likely, on an air-conditioned private plane that could drop you at a private airfield so you could board the bus minutes before your next destination and pretend to have been on it all along) or here:
where summertime temps reach 120 and where you can’t putter in your “little garden,” or mow the lawn with Trig on your back, and where there’s no “children’s play area” (unless you want to turn them into lizards), and where you yourself would fry in five minutes in your “shorts and tank top,” and where there’s no “family swimming hole,” not to mention no place for Todd to land his float plane…well, which would you choose?
Not to mention that your Political Action Committee can hardly ask people to donate for you to stay home.
Sarah tried that once, charging the state of Alaska per-diem for working out of her house on Lake Lucille, claiming that she was entitled because Wasilla wasn’t her “duty station.”
No wonder that this year she’s opting for the bus. Take a good look at that house and property (and, yes, that’s the compound she just bought and is moving into, even erecting a new fence around it): she spends a summer there and by September we’ll be calling her Osarah Bin Laden.
There’ll always be time next year for her new TLC show: Sarah Palin’s Arizona.
UPDATE:
NY Times (and who’s more “lamestream” than them?) offers Sarah advice from her new Scottsdale neighbors.
The one I feel sorry for is Monica Rahman,
who says that even though “the commotion was scaring her horses,” she’s “excited to have a new neighbor.”
The well-intentioned Ms. Rahman says she “plans to bring cookies to the Palins.”
I hope she’s ready to leave them at the outer gate. Having been a Palin neighbor, I’m pretty sure she won’t be welcomed with open arms.
Especially not after having spoken to the New York Times.
Good luck, Monica! Just check in here if you feel you need advice.
Posted in 2012, Joe McGinniss, Palin children, Sarah Palin, The Rogue, Todd Palin, Trig Palin | Tags: 2012 gop candidates, alaska, arizona, bus tours, cookies, extreme heat, GOP, GOP primaries, horses, lake lucille, monica rahman, neighbors, sarah palin 2012 campaign, sarah palin bus tour, sarahPAC, Scottsdale, the learning channel | 78 Comments »
NY Times Front Page: “Signs Grow That Palin May Run”
May 25, 2011
Nothing I haven’t been saying all along, but it’s suddenly the new mainstream meme.
Read it here.
Are there still doubters?
Posted in 2012, Joe McGinniss, mainstream media, Obama, right wing, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, The Rogue | Tags: 2012 primaries, glassner, GOP, sarah palin 2012 campaign, Scottsdale | 32 Comments »
The Beat Goes On…Sarah + Van Susteren Tonight
May 19, 2011
Sarah’s back on her chatty pills. After two Fox News appearances last night, she’s scheduled to be back with her spiritual Siamese twin, Greta Van Susteren, on Fox tonight. Any day now, I expect to see a National Enquirer headline about the “love triangle” involving, Sarah, Greta and Franklin Graham. For a Scientologist, Greta sure hangs with militant fundamentalist Christians a lot.
Do you think Sarah is squeezing all she can out of Fox because she knows that once she announces her candidacy that golden goose will turn back into just another Lake Lucille grebe?
The math is simple: the longer Sarah delays her announcement, the longer she can keep her hands in Rupert Murdoch’s pockets.
And Fox is putting no pressure on her. Why should they? Every time she’s on their air, their ratings go up.
Expect this win-win situation to stay as it is, at least through the summer.
Until, let’s say, September 11.
The tenth anniversary of 9/11 is coming up. Keep an eye on Sarah’s plans for the occasion.
Posted in 2012, evangelical, Fox, Greta Van Susteren, Joe McGinniss, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, The Rogue | Tags: 9/11, 9/11 anniversary, Fox News, franklin graham, fundamentalist christian, golden goose, grebes, lake lucille, national enquirer, sarah palin 2012 campaign, Sarah Palin announce for presidency | 45 Comments »
