When it comes to writing about Sarah Palin, the media seems compelled to focus on 2012 and her prospects of being the Republican presidential candidate despite the fact that it is a couple of years out.
It's something like putting her into a box that's not to be opened for another 2 ½ years. In addition to marginalizing her, it ignores the key role she's going to play in the crucial congressional elections next year when all 435 House seats and a third of the Senate seats are up for grabs.
Unlike her media critics, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin fully grasps the significance of the outcome of those elections next year. Should the GOP capture control of the House in the 2010 elections, the threat to our nation's future posed by Barack Obama will be eliminated. He’ll be a lame duck for two long years.
In 1994 Newt Gingrich nationalized the congressional elections which in the past had always been seen as local affairs. Voters were given to understand that their choices in the congressional contests had national implications and they acted accordingly, handing control of the Congress to the GOP.
We have a similar situation now. The outcome of the 2010 congressional contests will decide if the nation is ready to embrace Obama’s Marxist solutions to our multiple problems.
Voters will be confronted with a choice between unlimited government power and individual liberty. If the GOP wants to regain control of the Congress it must characterize the 2010 elections in those terms.
In 1994 Newt Gingrich rallied the voters around the Republican Party by presenting the voters with a GOP program he called the Contract with America which all GOP House candidates embraced as their own. Voters were thus confronted with a unified ticket of candidates who pledged to support fulfillment of that contract.
It's apparent to me that Sarah Palin understands the pressing need for a unifying factor that will rally the voters around the Republican banner rather than around individual candidates. And I further believe that she recognizes that she herself is that unifying factor.
After all, it not her personal charm or her beauty, or her outspokenness that attracts large numbers of Americans. It is instead that the American people recognize her as unashamedly one of their number.
She's the woman next door, the one you meet at the grocery counter, an outgoing friendly neighbor whose head is screwed on straight and who views the world around her much in the way we ordinary folks do. It’s called common sense, unfortunately uncommon in the public square.
That, however, is not how the almost universally liberal media sees her.
To them she is a threat that must be faced and eliminated. She has a target on her back and their arrows are pointed at its center. She must be destroyed, her potential as a successful GOP presidential candidate utterly eliminated. Her candidacy must be strangled in the crib.
To the horror of her legion of leftist detractors, the more they attack her, the stronger she gets. She has a unique talent of recognizing opportunities to get her points across coupled with the knowledge of when and how to strike and when and how to retreat temporarily and tantalizingly from public view.
Take the case of her forthcoming book. It has yet to be released; nobody has the vaguest idea of what it is about; and sight unseen, it is already a runaway best-seller.
If she can market a book in this manner, marketing herself and her political philosophy will be a cinch.
Keep your eyes on her role in the 2010 elections. It will be a portent of things to come.
Phil Brennan writes for Newsmax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist (Cato) for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He is a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers. He can be reached at [email protected]
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