Politico says: "Sarah Palin's bus tour leaves GOP cold."

Evidence?

While Palin has reveled in giving an extended one-fingered salute to the national press, refusing to give out details about her travel schedule and forcing reporters to literally chase her vehicle up I-95 in order to cover her, she reached out to precious few activists and party leaders in the states she visited.

So "leaves [them] cold" means that she was cold to them? In normal English usage, when you say X leaves Y cold, it means that Y isn't responding to X's overtures. It's not another way of saying X cold-shouldered Y.

Pennsylvania Republican Party Chairman Rob Gleason, whose state hosted Palin on visits to Gettysburg and the Liberty Bell, voiced a common exasperation about Palin’s tour: “I don’t think theater wins elections.”

“Running for president is a very serious thing and you need to deal with it as such,” Gleason said. “I’m looking for party builders.”

How far down on the list did Politico go to get a GOP politico to give the quote it wanted for an article disparaging Palin's bus tour? (And I love the locution "whose state hosted." Americans have a right to travel from state to state. We don't need the state to extend any invitation or hospitality. )

In New York – where Palin stopped at Ellis Island – GOP Rep. Peter King mused that the Alaskan “probably has more hardcore support than any other candidate.”

“But she needs to show that she can go beyond that, and this tour doesn’t accomplish that,” said King, who is urging Rudy Giuliani to enter the 2012 race.

So... King is pushing another candidate.

To former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, Palin’s visit to his state seemed more or less irrelevant. Asked for his thoughts on her arrival Thursday, the Republican shrugged: “I don’t think she’s running.”

Because nobody's more relevant than John Sununu.

Conclusion: The evidence in Politico's article is best seen as evidence of Politico's desire to undermine Sarah Palin.

"Sarah Palin's bus tour treats reporters like paparazzi."

Ha ha. Great headline.

"This isn’t a campaign bus. This is a bus to be able to express to America..."

"... how much we appreciate our foundation and to invite more people to be interested in all that is good about America and to remind ourselves we don’t need to fundamentally transform America, we need to restore what’s good about America."

Oh! So that's what kind of a bus it is.

Palinspeak. It's apt to drive the media mad.

"Sarah Palin and her family sneaked out in Washington on Sunday night for what she called an 'incognito' tour of the national monuments..."

Reports the NYT:

Details of the visit were posted Monday morning on her Web site, along with pictures that show her, her husband, Todd, and her daughters enjoying stops at the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial and the World War II Memorial.

In one picture, Ms. Palin and Mr. Palin are sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking out toward the Washington Monument, like any other couple might. In another, the whole family is seen standing below a part of the World War II Memorial that says “Alaska,” their home state.

Beautiful, innovative unrolling of what is presumably her candidacy for President.



Sarah, she's just like you, visiting the monuments, posing by the name of her state, wearing a visor and a baggy black T-shirt. I love the way she's slouching as if she's not thinking about her looks at all, while the other women are doing the photo-pose-y thing and the husband takes the figure-flattering 3/4 position and sucks in his gut.

Palin posts her Rolling thunder pics.

More here.

ADDED: "'I love that smell of the emissions,' she said, donning sunglasses and a Harley Davidson skullcap-style, black helmet."

Palin's Rolling Thunder photo op.

The NYT emphasizes that she couldn't really ride anywhere because of the crush of photographers. I will emphasize the utter gorgeousness of the photograph at the link (and, presumably, all the other photographs that got taken as the bike went nowhere).

"Althouse is shrewder."

Says Andrew Sullivan. Thanks. He's saying I'm shrewder than Byron York, referring to this post, earlier today, which is up to 249 comments (on the Friday afternoon before the long holiday weekend.) Of course, the topic is Sarah Palin. Sullivan connects my post, which tweaked the "serious people," with something Rush Limbaugh said:

'The Inside the Beltway’ ruling class — the elite — they’re more oriented toward candidates they can attach the word ‘serious’ to — which is another way of saying someone who is boring, who doesn’t ruffle feathers, someone who exudes an air of formal education and sophistication — she doesn’t exude that, and I think it’s going to shake a lot of people up ... You know the effect that she has on establishment Republican people.

Later, Sullivan put up another post on the Sarah Palin/seriousness theme. Asking "Does this sound like someone not running?," he posted Palin's bus tour ad:



Wow.

"The bottom line is Sarah Palin is not going to run for president... She's making money, she's moved on..."

"... she's kind of an entertainer rather than a politician. She still has some sway with the grass roots, but she is not going to run."

So says somebody close to Romney, according to Byron York. Somebody close to Pawlenty says something similar: "I don't think she's going to run... She has faded a lot in the last few months. I look at what she's doing now and say that she's found a way to get back in the story."

These people are in the middle of raising money and attracting attention to their candidate, so it's in their strong interest to diminish the rise of Palin. York acknowledges that his unnamed confidantes may be "just spinning." But he says, these are "serious people," and they point at her "lack of a campaign operation."

"Watch what she has done," says the Republican close to Romney. "Has she contacted one major donor across the country about putting together an organization? Has she talked to one member of the Republican National Committee about working for a campaign, or one governor, or one former governor about working for a campaign? The answer is no."

Maybe these "serious people" should be called conventional people. What did these "serious people" say when Palin was doing most of her communication via Facebook? Did the serious people say that serious people do not talk to the press and the public by writing Facebook updates? Because that would be conventional. Conventional people saying you're not serious because you're not conventional. But what if Palin is out ahead of them, and they can't see it? I wonder what these serious people thought about the Tea Party as it emerged?

York sees this, sort of:

It's possible Palin is in fact running and believes she can do so in a way that's never been done before. Maybe she can. It's certainly been tried; in 2007, former Sen. Fred Thompson and a small group of aides conceived of a campaign that would rely on Internet videos, social media and lots of buzz to gain support, with less reliance on old-fashioned things like shaking hands, begging for money and courting state party chairmen. It didn't work.

Strange contradiction there: "never been done before"... it's been done before and it didn't work. If Palin has a another new way, then it hasn't been done before, and you can't say it didn't work, based on the fact that "it" didn't work. We'll have to see what Palin's new way would be. But suppose it is essentially the same as what Thompson tried. The fact that it didn't work the first time it was tried doesn't mean it won't work the second time. And, obviously Sarah is not Fred.

York sees that:

Of course, Palin is a far more ambitious politician than Thompson. 

Yet the whole point of Fred was that he was the serious person. He was the adult in the room. Palin is the one so many people like to think of as a lightweight. Fred had an old-fashioned sort of gravitas, melded, perhaps, with some new ideas about how to campaign for President. It's 4 years later and Palin is a different person, with a different relationship to new (and old) media.

The serious, old-fashioned people are saying that there's a conventional, old-fashioned way to finance a campaign, and if Sarah Palin isn't using it, then she must not be running. And York is adding: If she is running, she will fail. But there may be a new way, despite what happened to Fred, and she may be doing it, and it may very well work. The Tea Party worked.

Things have changed since the days of Fred Thompson.

"Sarah Palin is launching a nationwide bus tour starting Sunday in Washington..."

"... Palin will also be stopping at other spots of symbolic national significance on the East Coast, including the Civil War battlefields at Gettysburg and Antietam, and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.... In addition to the tour, Palin’s camp recently announced a two-hour promotional film about the former governor set to premiere in Iowa next month."

So... does that mean she's going to run for President?

Is Sarah running?
	Obviously.
	She's testing the waters, as they say.
	Probably not. Just grabbing attention.
	No. Being President is not her thing. Wise up, America. Ignore this woman.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: That film — according to the Guardian — "will present her as a Joan of Arc-like figure beset at every turn by vicious leftwing enemies seeking to thwart her ambition of reviving the conservative legacy of Ronald Reagan." Somehow I doubt that the film actually mentions Joan of Arc. If not, the linked article has quite a deceptive headline: "Sarah Palin likened to Joan of Arc in two-hour documentary film." The title of the movie is "The Undefeated," which sounds more like the title of an American western than any reference to Joan of Arc. But the British website comes up with Joan of Arc, who was not undefeated. She was captured, purchased by the British and then tried — unfairly — and executed — brutally — by the British.

"Revealingly, Sarah Palin’s potential rivals for the 2012 nomination have not joined the party establishment in publicly criticizing her."

"They are afraid of crossing Palin and the 80 percent of the party that admires her. So how do they stop her? Not by feeding their contempt in blind quotes to the press — as a Romney aide did by telling Time’s Mark Halperin she isn’t 'a serious human being.' Not by hoping against hope that Murdoch might turn off the media oxygen that feeds both Palin’s viability and News Corporation’s bottom line. Sooner or later Palin’s opponents will instead have to man up — as Palin might say — and actually summon the courage to take her on mano-a-maverick in broad daylight."

That's Frank Rich, and look out: It's a trap. But do they know how not to fall into it?

Stanley Fish finds Sarah Palin's book "compelling and very well done."

Unlike compulsive Sarah haters — like Andrew Sullivan and Michelle Goldberg — Fish looks at the book as the form of literature it is, an autobiography:

[W]hile autobiographers certainly insist that they are telling the truth, the truth the genre promises is the truth about themselves — the kind of persons they are — and even when they are being mendacious or self-serving (and I don’t mean to imply that Palin is either), they are, necessarily, fleshing out that truth. As I remarked in a previous column, autobiographers cannot lie because anything they say will truthfully serve their project, which, again, is not to portray the facts, but to portray themselves.

Since "Going Rogue" is "satisfying and artful" and shows us what Palin is really like, it succeeds. Fish, an expert on literary art, explains the "architectonic structure" of the book in some detail. Go read that.

Now, what's especially cool about Fish's essay is that he confronts the smugness of his readers, the NYT readers. Instead of the chummy, we-hate-Sarah chatter that defines the liberal/lefty blogosphere, Fish slaps his friends in the face. You think you can write this lady off? You're idiots — he says, in so many words:

Do I believe any of [what Palin has written]? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she does, and that her readers feel they are hearing an authentic voice. I find the voice undeniably authentic... It is the voice of small-town America, with its folk wisdom, regional pride, common sense, distrust of rhetoric (itself a rhetorical trope), love of country and instinctive (not doctrinal) piety. It says, here are some of the great things that have happened to me, but they are not what makes my life great and American. (“An American life is an extraordinary life.”) It says, don’t you agree with me that family, freedom and the beauties of nature are what sustains us? And it also says, vote for me next time. For it is the voice of a politician, of the little girl who thought she could fly, tried it, scraped her knees, dusted herself off and “kept walking.”

In the end, perseverance, the ability to absorb defeat without falling into defeatism, is the key to Palin’s character. It’s what makes her run in both senses of the word and it is no accident that the physical act of running is throughout the book the metaphor for joy and real life. Her handlers in the McCain campaign wouldn’t let her run (a mistake, I think, even at the level of photo-op), no doubt because they feared another opportunity to go “off script,” to “go rogue.”...

The message is clear. America can’t be stopped. I can’t be stopped. I’ve stumbled and fallen, but I always get up and run again.

So look out, you smug fools.  She's real. Like Reagan was real.

Here are some of the great things that have happened to me, but they are not what makes my life great and American. Family, freedom and the beauties of nature are what sustains us....

Rod Dreher gives "a conservative read" to Sarah Palin's book. On NPR.

And he's not too kind.

The rap on Palin is that she's too shallow and inexperienced for the presidency — a conclusion that early Palin supporters like me came to during the 2008 campaign.

Like you? Oh, well then... I imagine that's why NPR picked you to do the "conservative read."

Alas, for conservatives in search of a champion, there's nothing in Going Rogue to challenge that conclusion. It's like this: Palin spends seven pages dishing about her appearance on Saturday Night Live, but just over one page discussing her national security views....

... Palin's economic program amounts to nothing more than tax-cutting, deregulating, and the endless repetition of shopworn GOP talking points.

This is the Republican Party's great populist hope?

Sarah Palin is selling a personality, not a platform. That's not dumb. She's doing the best she can with what she has to work with. She quotes her father's line upon her resignation this summer as Alaska's governor: "Sarah's not retreating, she's reloading." On evidence of this book, Sarah Palin is charging toward 2012 shooting blanks.

When reviewing a book, you should ask whether the book achieves what it set out to do. Dreher posits some goal other than the one Palin chose and slams her for not meeting it. She chose to write a personal memoir: What life feels like for Sarah Palin. So it's her "Dreams From My Father." The book Dreher aches for would be her "Audacity of Hope." Presumably, she is — her people are — working on that second book, and it will be fully fleshed out with exactly the conservative policy details that Sarah Palin needs for a presidential run.

Dreher admits that her choice to "sell[] a personality, not a platform" is "not dumb." But he leaps to the conclusion that her personality is "what [all?] she has to work with." That's not necessarily the case, and even if it is, with the infusion of great policy advisors, we will never know that she didn't come "loaded" with policy details.

You can't "charge" toward 2012. It's 3 years away, and it will take 3 years to get here. There's no great need to load up on much policy. What did Obama have in 2005? She is creating and extending her aura. She's following the Obama template. "Shooting blanks" — thanks for the gun imagery, but what the hell was Obama "shooting"?

Sarah Palin says she resigned as governor "so that I could get out there and fight without the shackles..."

"... for our state and for our country, to fight for what is right, and to support the people who have more freedom than I do evidently to be able to cast those votes and administer the policies and the laws that we need to protect our Constitution... I’m going to be freer now to fight for what’s right."

Ha ha. That's why I like being an independent blogger, so I can identify. But I still think she's running for President... and talk about shackles!

Wait. I can't lie. I have to back off from that identification. I have no sense of fighting for what's right here. I'm just talking about things that interest me, expression for it's own sake. If the occasion to distinguish right from wrong arises in the natural course of things, it will be in the mix. But it's not a fight. It's a conversation.

Intrade trading on Sarah Palin to be Republican Presidential Nominee in 2012.

If Sarah Palin's quitting was so horrendous — Michelle Goldberg called it fatal — the trading graph would not look like that.

A similar message from Gallup polling:

A new USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Monday night finds a core of 19% of U.S. voters who say they are "very likely" to vote for her should she run, and an additional 24% who are somewhat likely to do so, giving her a decent reservoir of potential support to build upon. However, nearly as many voters (41%) currently say they would be not at all likely to vote for her....

The poll finds 70% saying their opinion of Palin has not changed as a result of her resignation. Though this is clearly the minority of Americans, more say their opinion of her has gotten worse (17%) than improved (9%).

A lot of people who don't like Palin are going to say their opinion got worse, but these folks don't matter to her. How many of them are in the 17%? Then you've got 9% who like her even more. And the vast majority of people say their opinion is the same.

So all this cogitating and opining over the weekend is just so much blather. Palin got away with extricating herself from her annoying duties in that remote northern outpost. And I was right to say that quitting might have been the best choice with her, it's not worth getting all exercised about now, and we can just wait and see how she does when and if she runs.

The hysteria-makers failed.

"Over the next few months. I will be seeking a more suitable way of combining a meaningful public role, with hopefully, a more private life."

"I hope you can find it in your hearts to understand and give me the time and space that has been lacking in recent years."

Before Sarah Palin, there was Princess Diana. Tina Brown makes the comparison:

Like Princess Diana, who was both an addict of fame and its tormented victim, Palin is at constant war with the exposure she seems to live for. In Diana’s case, it was the raucous tabloids and their pitiless photographers who stalked her every waking hour alone or with her children. In Palin’s case, it’s that malign aristocratic phantom, the “media elite.”

It’s hard to feel as sorry for Palin as one did for Diana. The comely governor is so cocky in her ignorance, so relentless in pursuit of her own rise to fame, her arrogance makes it much harder to see her vulnerability. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there....

Doesn't mean it is, either. And even if she is like Diana, Diana came back more powerful than ever.

(By the way, Tina Brown's book about Princess Diana, "The Diana Chronicles," is a terrific read, full of apt analysis of media and fame.)

Hey, kids!

I'm in the NYT...

And: more Sarah Palin, so get cracking. This is sure to be a 200+ comment thread.

"Palin Blasts Critics, Remains Mum on 2012 Bid."

That's the headline at Fox News, and there are many other stories about whatever Sarah happened to say today.

She's got our attention locked onto her now — plain evidence of the effectiveness of her running-for-President strategy.

It's me and Michelle Goldberg, blabbing about the governors Palin and Sanford.

On the new Bloggingheads.

Special Sex and Palin Edition

Is Sarah Palin insane?
Examining her motivations
Edwards’s sex tape vs. Sanford’s Appalachian hike
Mark Sanford’s an adulterous flake. But he’s so romantic!
Is Palin the next Obama?
Analyzing why Michelle HATES Palin

Rush Limbaugh on Sarah Palin.

He mainly says the "Beltway types" are just speculating, he doesn't know what it means, but clearly a lot of people are afraid of her:

"Trying to keep up w/getting truth to u, like proof there's no 'FBI scandal'..."

Aren't u following Sarah Palin on Twitter? I sure am!

Is it presidential to write "u" for "you"?

Don't you u look forward to the time when world leaders will just text each other? Frankly, I believe when that day comes, we will have world peace.

(Ultra-cute heart doodle from DeniseKerr.com.)