THE PALIN POTENTIAL

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but the instant I heard Sarah Palin announcing her resignation from the Alaska governorship, I thought of Richard Nixon.

In 1960, he was cheated out of the presidency when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley stuffed enough ballot boxes to give Illinois to Kennedy, and Kennedy’s running mate Lyndon Johnson did the same in Texas.  In 1962, Nixon ran for governor of California and lost to Democrat Pat Brown by 300,000 votes.

His career was finished, and there wasn’t a politician nor a pundit in the country who didn’t say so.  He was washed-up, held no political office, and was under constant attack by a media that reviled him.  Yet six years later he was elected president in 1968.  How did he do this?

The same way Sarah Palin can be elected president in 2012.

He traveled abroad to meet with numerous world leaders and wrote articles for prestigious journals like Foreign Affairs.  But that was window dressing.  After Barry Goldwater’s disastrous defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, he spent most of 1965 and 1966 speaking at scores of fundraisers for Republican House and Senate candidates all over the country.

He did this tirelessly, indefatigably, and his national fame drew local donors to the fundraisers in droves.

The millions Nixon raised at these fundraisers enabled the GOP to gain 47 House seats plus three in the Senate in ’66.  He had single-handedly resuscitated the Republican Party.  He articulated Republican positions better than anyone in the party – and most important, dozens of Republicans in Congress owed their seats to him. 

Their support in state after state enabled him to sweep the primaries in spring ’68 and the nomination was his.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but as Mark Twain said, it often rhymes – and it will be rhyming for Sarah Palin from now to November 2012.  Nixon’s eight years as Eisenhower’s vice-president gave him knowledge and experience in national and world politics that Palin doesn’t have.  But she’s a fast learner and plenty savvy – plus there are four critical areas in which she leaves Tricky Dick in the dust:

Principles, character and integrity, an amazing yet non-elite life everyday Americans can relate to, and charisma.  Nixon had none of these.  Let’s take charisma as an example – for it’s the one thing Sarah and Zero have in common.  Zero, like Nixon, has a total lack of the first three. 

No American politician, Democrat or Republican, comes astronomically close to Zero in charisma – with the single exception of Sarah Palin.  Thus no one comes astronomically close to her in fundraising ability for Republican candidates in 2010.

And thus the Nixon Template will be her strategy from now to 2012.

The "higher calling" she gave as her reason for stepping down will first be the resuscitation of the Republican Party – politically and morally.  She understands you can’t have one without the other – which is the reason the entrenched GOP elite hate and fear her almost as much as do the Dems.

But the GOP elite cannot compete with her.  Hungry for victory in 2010, swarms of Republican House and Senate candidates will clamor for her to speak at their fundraisers, and when she does, she will raise orders of magnitude more money for them than they could without her.

All through the mid-term campaign, she never has to announce she’s running for 2012.  Her focus will be on Congress in 2010.  "America is stuck with this Democrat president until 2012, but not with this Democrat Congress," she’ll say.  "By electing a Republican majority in the House and the Senate in 2010, America can begin to undo the damage being done to her economy, her culture, and her national security."

This strategy has an excellent chance of success, especially given how miserably apparent will be the economic, cultural, and security disaster the Zero Presidency will be over the next 15 months.

Yes, the November 2010 mid-term elections are only 15 months away.  The only way the Nixon Template strategy can work for Sarah is for her to cast aside the anchor of governorship in Alaska, and campaign nationally.

But campaign not for herself, for individual Republican candidates across the country instead, for the rescue of America from the Dems by a reborn Republican Party that had been led astray like the Prodigal Son, and has returned (because she is forcing it to return) to its moral roots and basic principles.

When and only when this strategy works and the GOP wins big in 2010, she can announce for 2012.  The entire party, and dozens of Congressmen and Senators in particular, will be in her debt big time, and she can command their support in ’12 primaries.  The nomination will be hers.

At least that’s the strategy.  It can work and has historical precedent.  I admit I’m "all in" for Palin.  One reason is that she is the Republican the Dems and the Left are in hysterical fear of – for that alone she’s my favorite.  There are many others, such as she is as real and authentic as Zero is phony and empty.

A premier example of this, suggested to me by Joel Wade, regards optimism.  Hers is genuine, his is not.  Hers is reality-based, his is only rhetorical.  She takes the world as it is – she is pregnant with a Downs Syndrome baby – and considers it a blessing of life, not a curse to be aborted.  He mouths pretty words about "hope" and "change" that signify nothing.

In American politics, the candidate perceived to be the most optimistic usually wins.  Americans were bamboozled by Zero’s empty optimism in 2008.  They won’t be in 2012 when they have the real thing to compare it to.

I can see the campaign slogan, the tee-shirt, the bumper sticker now:

AN AMERICAN WOMAN.  AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT.  SARAH PALIN 2012.

But not until after November 2, 2010.  From now to then, watch how the Nixon Template unfolds for Sarah.  That’s the Palin Potential.  

[Ps: And if the strategy doesn’t work, well, then she can take Jack Kelly’s advice and become the female Glenn Beck on Fox and just as rich.]