Why Sarah Quit the Guv’s Job in Alaska

   Round One in the three-year, non-campaign for the Republican presidential nomination goes to Sarah Palin.  She takes that crown with her unexpected announcement on the eve of the 4th of July holiday that she would resign from the governor’s office later this month.  Let’s look at the Palin move for: timing, political strategy, and competitive reality.
   The timing is brilliant.  Back in the day, when I advised candidates as a business, I used to be asked what day was best to make an announcement of candidacy for a general November election.  I told many of them to pick Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when the newsrooms—both the pencil press and the electronic newsies—are looking for anything to cover that isn’t related to the annual Christmas shopping deluge that hits that day every year.
   Palin’s announcement on the front end of a four day holiday weekend will give her incalculable mentions and news exposure in virtually every newscast, newspaper, political and news blog all across the United States.  You would have to be the honored friend or family member in the box at a funeral service to avoid being exposed to Palin’s decision to resign and the automatic knee-jerk need for the chattering class to interpret its political impact (just as I am doing).
   As a political strategy, the surprise announcement also gets four stars.  Palin is geographically disabled when it comes to competing in a national campaign.  Nobody holds a national convention or major get-together in Anchorage.  Has anybody ever gone to Alaska, other than for recreation, unless headwinds forced their plane to refuel in route to Tokyo?  If you are the Governor of Alaska, you can’t just “happen to be in Louisville” for a meeting on Alaska state business at the same time the Midwestern Republican Governors are holding their annual meeting.
   Look how Governor Tim Pawlenty is pushing her.  Pawlenty announced earlier than any sitting governor that he would not run for reelection.  Since he removed himself from being held hostage for a 2010 reelection bid in Minnesota he’s been all over the country.  He’s been doing national news interviews, speaking in key southern Christian conservative states, holding private meetings with key supporters and fund raisers, and doing everything but working bus stops in those places where Republicans who will decide the future of the GOP in 2012 can take his measure.
   The biggest problem confronting Palin is public perception.  The reality is that among many in the Republican Party and among a large percentage of the general electorate, she is considered shallow, politically unskilled and intellectually challenged.  She is the persona about whom the saying “loose cannon on deck” was tailor-made.  A lot of Republicans regard her as the most divisive figure on the Republican national scene.  She has become the political version of “Typhoid Annie” because of her inexperience.  It is the result of a lack of knowledge in how to bow and scrape in dealing with Washington-based GOP political insiders, whose egos are every bit as over-blown as their Democrat counterparts along K Street.
   It’s the same inexperience that she exhibited in dealing with the national political press.  It may have made Tina Fey a household word but it made Sarah Palin the court jester.