Vid of Palin's Resignation and Other Stuff I Stole from Hot Air

She says the endless frivolous ethics complaints had cost her a half million dollars and a lot of her gubernatorial attention, and also that as a lame duck, she couldn't be as strong a governor as Alaska needed. That last part is very strange; obviously every politician becomes a lame duck at some point, but they don't resign from office due to that fact.

And a true lame duck period usually begins in the last year of an executive's last term, not halfway through it. Even if Palin had decided not to seek reelection, she could serve for another year before announcing that fact -- and so during this time she wouldn't be perceived as a lame duck at all.

I don't really get that rationale at all.

Krauthammer guesses this is because she's sick of the constant harassment and attacks; Juan Williams guesses it's a coming scandal.

If she did this because she was sick of the attacks and especially sick of the attacks on her children -- that's a darned good reason and I empathize with it completely in human terms.

In political terms, though, it's going to hard to run for a higher, far more important executive post when you resigned your last one a little more than halfway through your first term.

Obviously, the new rap on her would be How do you know she won't resign if the opposition just gets nasty enough to spur her into quitting?, which is sort of a darned hard question to answer. For me, anyway.

I can understand her decision as a human being, but am having hard time accepting it in terms of political leadership I can have confidence in.

If she wants to just spend time with her family and pull them out of the political spotlight and spare them the relentless attacks of the vicious left -- that's a great reason to resign from office. Pretty much the best reason there is.

But that reason puts her out of the 2012 race, because her kids are still going to be savaged by the media and left in 2012. As Krauthammer says, if this is her reason for quitting, she can run again... but only when the kids are adults (or near adulthood, anyway), which keeps her out of any races until 2016 or 2020, more likely.

On the other hand, some are still holding out hope for the very dubious 2012 gambit.

The nutroots is pushing rumors about a coming scandal. I will simply repeat their claims rather than give them any hits. They are claiming that she diverted materials and maybe labor from the construction of a Wasilla sports complex to her home, and that many of the same features are in both. (A sports complex has the same sort of windows one would find in a private home? Really?) And they claim that there is a federal investigation, and coming indictments.

The left kinda makes shit up, so, you know. But that's their claim.

Not every politician is willing to put personal ambition ahead of everything. It's laudable if, as is most likely, she just decided that her family and life were more important than serving an ungrateful public and exposing her family to a nasty, classless press.

But, for better or worse, that is what the job of president (or governor, or vice president entails), and if she's just not willing to put up with this crap anymore -- well, that is completely understandable, but it also is a decision that would seem to disqualify her from office, at least in the near term.

posted by Ace at 08:10 PM

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