What I like about Mrs. Palin
Well, as anyone with some sense could have predicted, Mrs. Palin’s favorables are going up:
PPP put her at 36/51 last month and ABC had her at 43/52 just three days ago. Now Fox drops this. Good lord — Sullivan’s going to have to take another few days off to cope with the data.
Of course, we are comparing polls from different pollsters (probably with different biases) so the comparison may not mean anything. For anything definite, we need to wait for the lamestream media to re-do their polls over the next month or so and see if there is a clearly recognizable trend (as there have been with ObamaCare, where even the most hardcore liberal outlet couldn’t help but recognize slipping support). But, I have faith. This is a center-right country, and Mrs. Palin’s positions and messages ought to resonate with a majority of, if not most, Americans.
I may not agree with Mrs. Palin on everything (especially … when she talks about special need kids, I wince a little—I don’t think it’s the government’s place to treat people differently, regardless of skin color or ability) but I do like her a lot for this one reason: her core message has been rock solid and unchanging through thick and thin and through obscurity, popularity, notoriety, and back to popularity.
Unlike Barack Obama, she hasn’t flipped and flopped on this issue and that issue trying to appease this constituency and attract that special group. The few cases where her position shifted a little (I think her position on global warming changed at some point from “absolutely no global warming” to “anthropogenic effects are not the most important ones”), it reflects more of her change of heart and/or understanding, not political expediency.
We need people who say what they mean and mean what they say. Frankly, I can respect even liberals like Rep. Barney Frank, because they do really believe in what they say—so they try to make some sense when they say something. With people like Rep. Frank, we can actually identify points of contention (it all really comes down to the role of the government). We can either work towards resolving that contention, or at least agree to disagree on that one fundamental point.
But with people like Barack Obama, where his words mean nothing and his promises have rather short expiry dates, there is simply no dealing with them. There is no possible reasonable argument we can make that will convince those people, and there is nothing they can say that will make me trust them.