Opinion: Now, it’s Sarah Palin’s turn to target Democrats

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Nevada didn’t invent dust, but it has perfected it. And Saturday in the dusty dump of Searchlight no one will need a searchlight to find the political dust-up with the campaign arrival of one Sarah Palin to headline a major Tea Party event, as she did in Nashville earlier this year.

Palin is drawing some tea party frowns today with her campaigning in Arizona for former Republican presidential running mate John McCain, undergoing a primary challenge from the right, as we described here the other day.

Palin will seek to bolster McCain’s conservative credentials at a Tucson rally today, a Phoenix fundraiser tonight at the same hotel where they conceded to the Democrat ticket in 2008, and another rally in Phoenix Saturday.

McCain’s opponent, former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, paints himself as the true conservative and....

...seeks to dismiss Palin’s popular participation as ‘the very human impulse of gratitude’ for plucking her from Alaska’s relative political obscurity and dragging her down to a decisive national defeat. Which she’s now turned into a bestseller, a newly-confirmed TV documentary series on the Learning Channel, a couple of million dollars and an active SARAHPAC.

Longer term, Palin is doing what any possible presidential candidate should do 32 months out: Hand out her precious personal campaign time and PAC money to potential allies for her own race should she decide to launch one about this time next year.

That’s her much vaunted Common sense way.

Other former GOP governors like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee are doing the same thing. All three came in at the top of a CNN poll’s Republican candidate 2012 wishlist Thursday.that also showed Obama tied at 47% with Anyone from the GOP and with a majority of Americans now seeing him as a one-term president, despite this week’s healthcare hoopla.

Using her favorite Facebook page, Palin’s just said she’s going to invest her money and time in ‘commonsense conservatives’ to oppose her list of targeted Democratic representatives (see above).

‘We’re going to fire them,’ Palin proclaimed, ‘and send them back to the private sector, which has been shrinking thanks to their destructive government-growing policies.

‘Maybe when they join the millions of unemployed, they’ll understand why Americans wanted them to focus on job creation and an invigorated private sector.’

Why do these Democrats draw Palin’s attention? They voted for ‘Obamacare’ and represent districts the McCain-Palin ticket carried.

But not every stop is political for Palin. Officials at California State University, Stanislaus said Thursday the former Alaska governor has agreed to make a rare California visit and speak at a fundraiser on June 25 marking the school’s 50th anniversary.

Back to politics: As if to confirm the vulnerability of such Democratic folks, Vice President Joe Effing Biden acknowledged to party donors in Baltimore the other night that they would lose seats this November, as The Ticket reported here.

Joe blamed the anticipated defeats not on the economic stimulus’ failure, not on the rancorous and endless healthcare debate, not on the now gaping enthusiasm gap between his party and the GOP. Biden blamed the upcoming 2010 hard times instead on President Obama’s 2008 success. Who knew back when they were donating $750 million for hope and change that it would turn out so dismally?

‘Barack generated such an overwhelming turnout and enthusiasm,’ Biden said, ‘that we had the biggest turnout in history. It was gigantic. And a lot of really good Democrats got washed up on shore and all of a sudden were Congressmen, in districts that Democrats have no business having Congressmen.’

As our good buddy Moe Lane wondered out loud over here, how’d you like to be among the Biden donors who’d just shelled out $2,500 each to hear straight from the horse’s mouth that their money was about to be wasted on some certainly hopeless causes?

Related item:

The Sarah Palin election night speech(es) we never got to hear

-- Andrew Malcolm

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