GOP Afraid of Palin?

Bill Kristol writes in The Washington Post that the mainstream media and GOP establishment are afraid of Sarah Palin making a run for President in 2012.

David Frum answers on New Majority.

They - we! - are afraid that Palin’s distinctive combination of sex appeal, self-pity, and cultural resentment has a following in today’s GOP. We are afraid that it is not utterly inconceivable that she could win the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, and we are afraid that if she did so she would lead the party to a 1964-style debacle, accompanied by unnecessary losses down the ballot.

We are afraid that even if Palin does not win the nomination, that she will still help to brand the Republican party in a very damaging way. No national candidacy has ever collapsed so rapidly and totally as Sarah Palin’s in 2008. The evidence is strong that she is the only vice presidential nominee in history to have had a significant impact on voting preferences - and negatively so. Since voting day, she has only continued to lose ground. Yet no matter how ill-considered her statements and actions, her core group of supporters excuse everything on the grounds that she is a social conservative martyr, scorned by her cultural betters. Those excuses are exactly the wrong formula to win back the voters the GOP lost in 2008 and needs to recover to win again.

While I frequently disagree with Frum on policy, I think he is dead-on in his observations about his own party.

UPDATE: Richard Cohen (no flaming liberal) of The Washington Post chimes in.

It would behoove us, though, to consider how close we all came to utter disaster -- the "counterfactual" suggested above. A recent Vanity Fair article clarifies just how awful a vice president (or president) Palin would have made. During the campaign, she proved allergic to briefings and remained determined to stay uncorrupted by knowledge. More recently, she explained her decision to -- permit me some GOP talk -- cut and run as Alaska governor by lapsing into no known language, explaining herself afterward in a burst of Tweets that only raised more questions. One question, though, has been settled: She is unfit for office.

Naming Palin to the GOP ticket -- a top-down choice by McCain -- was the most reckless decision any national politician has made in the longest time, and while it certainly says something about McCain, it says even more about his party. It has lost its mind.

--Ballard Burgher