Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

I finished reading Mrs. Palin’s Going Rogue: An American Life. It’s a good memoir / political treatise, and I am very glad that she got to tell her side of the story—it was so frustrating with the “mainstream” media bashing her with tips from “anonymous sources” and not getting answers from McCain-Palin campaign, but with this book, I see that for every one of the frivolous complaints (about her wardrobe and her children traveling with her) there is a very good explanation.

But this is a good book not only for getting her story out, but also for explaining her political and policy views and her expertise—especially in energy policy, which will only become more important as time goes on. I suppose if you are reading the book just to get her positions on various issues, you’ll get frustrated because of all the narrative in the way, but then, if you are so interested you can probably find other sources. On the other hand, for the ordinary Americans who identify more with Mrs. Palin on the personal level and not just her political views, this book takes a very good approach to sell her positions, surrounded and explained by her narrative.

As for liberals who attack her for “settling scores”, well. I guess bias is a liberal characteristic and we can’t really … blame them for being so bigoted all the time, but read with an open mind. There is only one person Mrs. Palin is settling score with, i.e. Steve Schmidt, a.k.a. “headquarters”, and given all the nasty things Schmidt said about her, can you blame Mrs. Palin? At least she’s saying it out in the open, with her reputation on the line. Schmidt didn’t even give her the chance to face her accuser by making all those leaks anonymously.

In any case, this book is much heavier on her narrative (independent of the McCain campaign) and her political views than her settling score, and that should be evident to any fair-minded reader. If you hear or read anyone claiming that Mrs. Palin is settling score with this book, well, consider the possibility that they are simply repeating the leftist party line. The evidence may be more convincing than you suspect now.

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.