Days of Change

Day 1156 – Why We Love Sarah Palin

Vice Presidents are an interesting group. The Constitution originally planned for the Vice President to be the second choice in the general election. If a Republican ran against a Democrat, the president and vice president could be political opponents. The parties stopped that early on, especially since it was a factor in Alexander Hamilton’s assassination in a duel.

Modern Vice Presidents are either former losers in presidential nomination contests or party heretics who are being neutered. Ironically, the ones who are VPs as a nuisance have a strange tendency to become president. Sarah Palin was neither. She was a very popular governor who only became a pariah after her nomination.

Palin represents everything people say they want in representative government. She came from an average family background. She had a family and worked in the private sector before she worked in government. Her first elected position was on the school board. We weren’t told that her college or her campaign staff qualified her for executive office. She earned that respect by being an effective manager in her own right. She resigned from a political appointment, something inconceivable to many politicians, because of the corruption of the office. She is a citizen politician.

One of the reasons the knives came out for Sarah Palin, besides her tremendous charisma, was because she took her role seriously as the Vice Presidential nominee. She took on Obama’s thin record and his criminal associations. She did what John McCain would not do, which is to be expected of a VP nominee. It’s too bad McCain also had her silenced for much of the campaign, when they weren’t booking her on hostile interviews.

Sarah continues to fight the good fight for Republicans. She is going to do her best to make sure Republicans take back the Senate this year, so that Obama’s influence can be blunted regardless of the outcome. I think she did the right thing. Whatever this election does end up being about, it won’t be about anything the Founding Fathers intended.