Get ready to hear the phrase “Sarah Palin didn’t even serve a full term as Alaska’s governor” over and over again, because it will among her opponents’ favorite refrains in the 2012 campaign, if she runs for president. She has just gift-wrapped, tied in a bow, and sent to Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, postage pre-paid, the perfect sound-bite encapsulation of her profound inexperience and unsuitability for high office.
In a word, or rather an acronym: WTF?
I have no idea what Palin is thinking in resigning as governor later this month, roughly 2 1/2 years before the first presidential primaries, but if her motivation is to “focus on a presidential run,” as the initial MSM conventional wisdom holds, it makes no sense whatsoever. I could understand choosing not to run for re-election in 2010, but resigning in the middle of 2009 in order to focus on the 2012 election?? What?!?
The “focus on 2012” theory is so implausible, and obviously self-destructive to the supposedly focused-on campaign, it makes me wonder if something else is going on here. Is there a health issue? Another ethics problem that was about to explode, which she’s hoping to sweep under the rug with this decision? Has she turned Andrew Sullivan straight and now they’re running away together? 🙂 Whatever it is, I suspect there is at least one additional shoe still to drop here. We shall see.
UPDATE: Conservative blogger Ed Morrissey, former Palin supporter, writes:
There’s really no excuse, and what Rich Lowry also calls her “terrible,” “rambling,” and “not at all persuasive” statement showed that. Unless there was a serious illness or a serious scandal, the resignation on the grounds Palin gave is simply incomprehensible. She has destroyed her own credibiity in a single day.
Actually, Ed, she never had any credibility to begin with. You just noticed its absence today.
UPDATE 2: Josh Marshall writes:
For the moment there’s no clear evidence of or explanation for some massive political scandal or bombshell that would have driven Palin from office. [But] the idea that Gov. Palin just up and decided for no reason in particular to resign her office little more than half way through her term, with a hastily assembled press conference and a rambling and histrionic speech, is just too silly for serious consideration. …
As with her speech itself, the tell is that the decision was apparently so rushed and sudden that there was not enough time to come up with a plausible cover story or to get out the word about what it was.
It looks like a duck and quacks like a duck. Either Palin is resigning ahead of some titanic scandal (which should emerge in short order if it exists) or her resignation was triggered by an even more extreme mental instability than we’d previously suspected.
