Time for the GOP to say in public what many say in private about Sarah Palin: responding to Joe Scarborough's challenge

Ryan Streeter

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asks today in Politico:

What man or mouse with a fully functioning human brain and a resume as thin as Palin’s would flirt with a presidential run?

More than her lack of experience, though, Scarborough's real gripe with Palin is what I would call a lack of moral seriousness. She exhibits this disturbing trait not in her reality-show antics as much as her swipes at Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Glossing over Reagan's record as CA governor and Bush's heroics in WWII, Palin has chosen instead to elevate herself by citing the former's acting career and the latter's "silver spoon" upbringing. 

Scarborough says that he:

would prefer that the former half-term governor promote her reality shows and hawk her books without demeaning the reputations of Presidents Reagan and Bush. These great men dedicated their lives to public service and are too good to be fodder for her gaudy circus sideshow.

I accept Scarborough's challenge. If ever the GOP needed to fulfill its ambition to be the party of ideas, it is now. If Sarah Palin cannot soberly enter the public debate about the big issues facing America, she should step aside. More specifically, at a minimum she needs to demonstrate that:

• she can articulate that she has a plan for how to meet the near-term challenges of unemployment and economic growth,
• she can articulate that she understands the long-term entitlement challenge we face and what the best GOP plan should entail for fixing them and our deficit problem,
• she can articulate that she understands what our commitments abroad entail and what she thinks that means for military spending and operations,
• and her poll numbers reflect growing support as a result of how she does on the previous three points rather than her reality-show popularity.

Our ConservativeHome Republican Panel shows that active conservatives like Sarah Palin a lot, but they don't think she's as electable as Mitt Romney. Because voters have a basic grasp of her limitations, Republicans should not be afraid to challenge her to get serious about the country's needs rather than her own ambitions - and to step aside if she chooses not to.

Comments

[Frank]

It's Joe, not Joel Scarborough. And I think he's wrong.

[Tim Montgomerie]

The UK Spectator looks at Romney V Palin as a contest between brainpower and starpower...

http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/6504278/palin-versus-romney.thtml

[Stephen]

So we have a woman who was a mayor in 1996. Governor in 2006. Cleaned up the state and was Vice-presidential candidate in 2008. But Joe says she's a no hoper.

I would say she has a foreign policy weakness which could be rectified by simply taking some time off and go and visit the rest of the world.

IMO she'll be back!!!

[James]

"Mayor in 1996. Governor in 2006." etc - I think she will have to live down her cowardly resignation midway through her first term as governor, and her failure to deliver Joe Miller to the US Senate. Both are intimately related - Alaska, the only state to have been governed by Palin, doesn't like her. She may well have lost had she run again this year (the *Republican* State Senate Majority Leader said in 2008 that Palin wasn't even qualified to be governor, let alone VP). She doesn't even lead some of the Republican candidate polling there!

I think Scarborough's critique is a powerful one - she knows she's grossly underqualified so she's attempting to run down the qualifications of predecessors (for what it's worth, I thought that Obama was, at best, severely lacking in terms of having sufficient experience and I'm deeply sceptical of candidates with no executive experience).

What I would add - and what both Scarborough and the Speccie should have picked up - is that she is riding the tiger of "anti-elitism" in the most disappointing way. It's one thing to attack cossetted, distant political elites - quite another to say quite openly that expertise and intelligence are bad things to be reviled and rejected. Her breathtaking contempt for anyone who actually knows anything about issues and policies speaks volumes about her (in)ability to govern.

[Edward]

Her resignation as governor half way through her term to become a celebrity was, frankly, pathetic. I tremble for America if she gets to the presidency - she'd be worse than Obama.

I say this as a fan of the Tea Party and as someone who thinks the federal government should be cut by about half.

[Steve]

The United States has, for a multitude of reasons, got a hill to climb rebuilding its reputation and standing in the changing, globalised arena of international politics and economics. Mrs Palin would be one of the worst choices to achieve this rebuilding.

[Helen Smith]

Why all this anti-Palin rhetoric on conservativehome? I think men are almost as scared of her as liberals are.