SARAH PALIN: COULD BE A LOSER…AGAIN

 

                     …This is Sarah Palin today.  A little older, but still a loser???

 

Trump agrees to support Sarah Palin…do they deserve each other?

 

Talk about a “loser, supporting another loser”.  We now have the former president Donald Trump endorsing Sarah Palin for Alaska’s lone congressional seat, throwing his weight behind the ex-governor who embraced Trump, long before he came to dominate the GOP.

Palin announced last week that she is running for the seat vacated by Republican Rep. Don Young, who died last month after representing Alaska for nearly a half-century.  Trump’s approval, with the number of Republicans in Alaska, could boost the former vice-presidential candidate’s standing in a field of more than 50 candidates.  (Hopefully, a group of those 50 candidates will score better than Palin.)

On the other hand, because it is now known, that once people got to known Palin’s lack of intellect, her vice president candidacy on the presidential ticket in 2008, cost John McCain more than 2 million votes.

“Sarah shocked many when she endorsed me very early in 2016, and we won big,” Trump said in a statement. “Now, it’s my turn! Sarah has been a champion for Alaska values, Alaska energy, Alaska jobs, and the great people of Alaska.” Like Trump, Palin portrays herself as a brash voice against the establishment and the media, and the former president went on to praise Palin for standing up to “corruption” in government and the “Fake News.”

It’s interesting that someone as corrupt as Donald Trump, is praising Palin for being against “corruption in government.”  Talk about the “liar, talking about the liar!”

The 2022 Republican candidates have scrambled to court Trump for support in GOP races.  Even as the former president shows a willingness to abandon GOP favorites as he renounces his support for Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) last month,  That was after this Senate hopeful strayed slightly from Trump’s false narratives regarding the 2020 presidential race.

Palin’s race and a slew of upcoming primaries will test the power of Trump’s support in 2022, as his chosen gubernatorial candidate in Georgia today, struggles.  Also, as some observers say an intense focus on his election falsehoods could hurt anyone he picks in the general contest.

Palin cast herself in a Facebook post last week as a “fighter against what she calls the radical left.”

 Palin had shot to right-wing stardom as Sen. John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, and she remained in the headlines, even after leaving political office.  She then boosted the Tea Party Movement and embraced her pop-culture status on reality TV.

“America is at a tipping point,” Palin said in a recent statement, criticizing inflation, praising the “free market” and denouncing illegal immigration. “As I’ve watched the far left destroy the country, I knew I had to step up and join the fight.”

Palin is competing against candidates across both parties in the June 11 primary for Young’s seat.  The first step in a special election under Alaska’s new top-four primary system. The four people who win the most votes will appear on a ranking-choice ballot in August.  (This is where Palin has a good chance of being in the top four.)

Voters passed the change to election procedures in 2020 over the opposition of many Republicans. The shift has upended a previously predictable race in Alaska, where Democrats have not won a federal election for almost 15 years.

Palin’s opponents include 2020 Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Al Gross, Anchorage Assembly member Christopher Constant (D) and Republican state Sen. Josh Revak, who had chaired former Representative Young’s 2022 re-election campaign.

Palin, who was elected Alaska’s first female governor in 2006, paid tribute to Trump as she signaled interest in Young’s former seat.

“We need people like Donald Trump, who has nothing to lose, like me,” she said on Fox News last month. “We’ve got nothing to lose and no more of this vanilla milquetoast namby-pamby … stuff that’s been going on.” (Whatever that means.)

While endorsing Palin, Trump falsely claimed that she “lifted the McCain presidential campaign out of the dumps.”   (It may have started that way until the voters got to know her.)  Palin’s selection as McCain’s running mate did initially thrill the Republican base, until McCain who would eventually express regret over his choice.  Palin won national name recognition but was also ridiculed for her major verbal gaffes, and she was portrayed as being unserious and totally unqualified on “Saturday Night Live.” Stanford University researchers concluded in a 2010 study that Palin’s presence on the presidential ticket cost McCain 1.6 percentage points, that was from where the “more than 2 million lost votes information came.”

Palin’s popularity in Alaska fell drastically after her 2008 vice-presidential campaign and her decision to resign as governor the following summer.  In 2018, when Palin suggested that she might challenge Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) after Murkowski, the moderate incumbent, declined to support Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.  A recent poll conducted by Alaska Survey Research found that only 31% of Alaskans had a favorable view of Palin.

Of course, Trump just had to use his endorsement to criticize the campaign of Palin’s onetime running mate, McCain.  McCain was a moderate Republican whom Trump has repeatedly attacked, even after McCain’s death.  While he was campaigning for president in 2015, Trump infamously said McCain was “not a war hero”, despite McCain’s service and being captured in Vietnam, and Trump just had to say that he liked “people that weren’t captured.”

Palin has largely stayed away from national politics for the past decade. But she continued to champion conservative causes and cultivate somewhat of a following.  Palin sold more than 2 million copies of her memoir, and she signed a lucrative contract with Fox News and starred in the TLC TV show “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.”

This year, she defied New York City’s coronavirus rules by dining out in the city while being unvaccinated, and she took her long-running libel suit against the New York Times to trial.

“What am I trying to accomplish? Justice, for people who expect the truth in the media,” Palin told reporters as she entered court.  A judge dismissed the case, saying Palin did not show that the Times acted with “actual malice” even as the judge criticized the newspaper’s error about Palin, in a 2017 editorial.

Like others who have won Trump’s endorsement, Palin has helped amplify the former president’s totally debunked claims that “there was rampant fraud in the 2020 election.”

Hopefully, Palin will also lose in 2022, just as Trump did, in 2020.

Copyright G. Ater 2022