Palin: Too Big to Fail
By Everybody’s having a lot of fun with the various rumors about the internal conflicts in the McCain campaign, and the efforts by McCain and Palin staffers to blame each other for defeat. Particularly hilarious is the following threat by Erick Erickson:
RedState is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper.
We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.
We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.
It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.
They’ll just have to be stuck at CBS with Katie’s failed ratings.
P.S. – Did I ever tell you how RedState was able to stock Gov. Palin’s campaign plane with twenty of these?. We were glad to. And we were glad not to mention it at the time. We are rooting for Sarah Palin. Don’t make us add you to our list. Do you really want to be next to Kathleen Parker in the leper colony?
Indeed.
McCain deserved what he got for picking Palin; idiocy is often the wage of maverick-itude. Part of the effort by McCain staffers is to point the blame away from their own guy, but I also wonder whether there’s a concerted effort on their part to destroy Palin’s future electoral prospects. This could be understood as McCain’s last gasp effort to save the Republican Party from the monster that he created, but I suspect we’ll never really know.
In any case, I expect that the effort will make Palin more toxic to anyone who’s not in the Republican base, but won’t touch her position within the base. Sarah Palin is too big to fail. Bill Kristol has staked his prestige on Palin’s future, and the simple fact that she thought Africa was a country isn’t going to make he and his back down. He’s too deeply invested in her, and everyone else in the conservative punditariat is too deeply invested in him. If she crashes, everyone goes down. I foresee two possible futures; in one, Kristol starts walking everyone back from the brink in a year or two, and Palin’s future Presidential candidacy goes down the memory tube. In the other, we get Sarah! 2012, and a Goldwater style annihilation next time around. I’m guessing door #2.