Adversity and Character

I find it amazing when people who are supposed to be sober adults known for analyzing things clearly totally blow. That the media and the progressives are writing off Sarah Palin having any sort of political future is a given, she and her matter of fact personality scare their Depends into knots. What boggles me is the political commentators from the center and right who are writing off any future for Sarah Palin. What is even worse is their cavalier dismissal denies a very real possibility - namely this time out of the political limelight may be what Sarah needs to more fully learn her strengths and most importantly where her weaknesses lay so they can be corrected.

Would England have had such a forthright and stalwart Prime Minister in Sir Winston Churchill if he had not lost his cabinet post in 1929? And then spent the following decade honing his skills as a leader and being unafraid to go against the flow of appeasement to warn a torpid England of the danger Hitler posed.

Or Richard Milhous Nixon. He was Dwight Eisenhower's Vice President and seemed a shoo-in to be the next president. Then he tangled with Jack Kennedy. Kennedy won in a squeaker and Nixon rather famously said 'you wont have Dick Nixon to kick around.' Then eight years later it was Richard Nixon who became President of the United States and tried to honorably dig the United States out of the Johnson created quagmire called VietNam. Then Richard Nixon resigned during his second term over Watergate and spent the next two decades rebuilding his reputation and becoming an elder statesman Republicans would listen to.

Finally lets look at Ronald Reagan. Former movie star. Former governor of California. And always a man who loved his country as his 1964 speech at the Republican National Convention showed. In the wake of Nixon's resignation, Reagan was rebuffed by the Republican Party which stood behind the nomination of Ford. So James Earl Carter became the next president on a platform of change. Reagan spent these wilderness years becoming better read and more published on national and international affairs. So when 1980 came for the Republicans to pick someone to run against a politically mortally wounded Carter, there was Ronald Reagan. And the following next 8 years literally changed the world as the Warsaw Pact and its Soviet master started to fall apart. And it was under the leadership of Reagan's Vice President George H.W. Bush that the Berlin Wall fell, the Warsaw countries threw off the yolk of Soviet domination and the USSR fractured into a bunch of new nations.

So to count out Sarah Palin just because she refuses to play the normal game of politics is foolish. Sarah Palin has been counted out before and rose to a higher office as she was proven right. History is replete with people considered washed up who then proceeded to prove the intelligentsia wrong.