Honestly, this writer doesn’t want to get to get too excited just yet. Palin has not officially announced. Polls have always been flaky. Mike Huckabee explained that polls are just a snapshot in time and are not predictors of an outcome that is still far out. Sarah Palin has said that polls are for strippers and cross country skiers. In an effort to remain intellectually honest, this blogger remains committed to his theory that while polls can give you a general feel for how the electorate is feeling at a given moment, the only poll that counts is the one where people go into voting booths and push buttons or levers.
The latest polls, however, give justification to arguments that Palin supporters and open minded conservatives have been saying for the last three years. She is totally electable. She always has been and she always will be – barring some strange twist of fate involving her health, a Howard Dean moment or if by some statistical aberration that with all the attempts to destroy her (the dumpster diving, the email reading, the interviewing of almost every resident in Alaska), her enemies missed a paper trail that showed embezzlement or a surveillance video of her robbing a bank. But even then, if they found something like that now, they’ve cried wolf so many times, many people wouldn’t believe them.
The American people are having a Laity Lodge moment when, like in the radio commercial, they are getting to see first hand that the rumors about Sarah Palin are flat wrong. At the same time, they are finally seeing through the smoke screen that the media has thrown around Obama since he was a candidate for president in 2008.
Ronald Reagan was 25 points behind Carter 8 months out from the election. His electability at this point in 1979 was way more in doubt than Palin’s is. Reagan didn’t have the advantage of the electronic era with a 24 hour news cycle, Facebook and other new media ways of expressing himself. The new era of news is a double edged sword, It was a weapon to be used against Palin to smear her by having every negative meme perpetrated on fly up the media flagpole because of the complicity of the mainstream media. This did not stop Palin and her supporters from turning it into a weapon for them to compress time frames and deal with the smears almost instantaneously.
Because Reagan didn’t have today’s media at his avail, it took him right up to merely weeks before the election to overcome the public’s concerns. But, the methodology was the same. He showed them in the final debate with Jimmy Carter that he was not only competent but affable by being himself in front of the American people. There was no print or video medium then that could stop him from busting through the myths then just as there is no print or video medium today that can alter the speech that Palin gave in Indianola, IA.
When you see Palin drawing this close to Obama in the polls, it’s a testimony to the fact that we have new media and a 24 hour news cycle that can be used both ways. It’s highly unlikely that Palin would have been able to make this kind of a comeback given the intense and continuous smears hurled at her hourly and daily for the last three years had she been trying to run for president during the late 1970’s. Today, those smears are accellerated, but so are the responses to them.
While left wing bloggers, liberal cable news channels and progressive websites were spending all their energy using the modern media to smear Sarah Palin, she and her supporters were not daunted by the onslaught. They saw the same media as their opportunity to pour out onto the cyber battlefield and go head to head with established writers, journalists and news organizations that were once thought of as too powerful to take on.
For the first time, ordinary Americans were able to come out en masse and draw swords on a flat rhetorical playing field. Liberals, who once swayed the playing field in their direction by infiltrating established media organizations were finding that they were no longer able to rig the game. The Joe Kleins and Keith Olbermanns of the world found that average conservative Americans had honed their skills to the level where they could not only take them on in the arena but force them to retreat.
Just look at the Palin army. This highly organized and highly motivated operation was born out of a need to defend a bloodied, bruised and nearly beaten Sarah Palin after the 2008 election. The Palin operation was once a few members of Team Sarah who’d go to smear article after hit article about her and defend her in the comment sections. Today, there are hundreds of Pro Palin websites, including Conservatives4Palin, a website that could shoot down a Joe McGinniss missile before it even left the silo.
Just look at the Tea Party, too. It’s millions strong and growing. It was born out of fear of a big government Obama presidency and a rant on CNBC by Rick Santelli. It became the gathering and breeding ground for conservative and libertarian activists. After the 2008 election, the conservative movement was on its last legs. The only way the Republican Party could survive would be to form a coalition of libertarians and conservatives and take on an Obama agenda that began falling flat day one. Millions who were electrified by Sarah Palin or horrified by Barack Obama rushed to the Tea Party almost immediately. The coalition occurred naturally, with no prodding from the GOP leadership. It was a bottom up movement, not a top down one.
On 9/12/2009, over a million strong marched on Washington. From that day forward, the movement has pushed aside the lies of the mainstream media and proven once and for all what a fraud and what a phony Barack Obama really is.
Braveheart’s William Wallace would be proud of the Tea Party movement and Palin’s Ordinary Barbarians who have stormed the rhetorical battlefield in staggering numbers to take on the Obama army of thugs. The One once spoke to hundreds of thousands gathered in Chicago on the night of his victory while the battered and defeated McCain army moped off hoping to some day return again. The tears in Sarah Palin’s eyes that night became the elixir in an image that would drive Palinistas to near political death to avenge the wrong that was done to their leader. The loss also drove the rest of the Tea Party movement to work that much harder to make sure it never happened again.
Today, the army is vibrant. It’s energized. It’s enthusiastic. This is happening at a time when many are jumping off the Obama bandwagon. Millions of independents, even some liberal journalists are beginning to see the Obama ship listing and they want off now before it sinks.
The movement is confident that they are onward to victory. The army grows. More and more people are pledging to not vote for Obama. More and more people are seeing the truth about Sarah Palin. They are beginning to believe that she can do it.
There is still much work to do. We’ve come a long way. We have an even longer way to go. But we will get there.
Listen to me talk about this and Organize4Palin with Marth Cano of Palin Promotions here:
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