Sarah Palin is not running for president

Let me repeat: Sarah Palin is not running for president. But if she does, she will blow up like the the Hindenburg if she continues on her current path of sarcasm, negativity and bumper-sticker "substance" instead of pronouncements rooted in intellectual rigor. That she refuses to hide away for even a month for a crash course in Republican and conservative ideals, programs and solutions tells me that she's more interested in being an entertainer than an accountable politician.

I'm sure I sound like a broken record. My critiques of Palin are voiced with the frequency and the "I know best" tone of a backseat driver. But I'm not alone. Chris Cillizza, Margaret Carlson and Marc Ambinder used Palin's speech at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference last week to zero in on Palin's reliance on sarcasm and how it weakens her on the political stage.

Sarcasm is the great weapon of the aggrieved. And no one wields it with as much gusto as the half-term governor of Alaska. "Sarcasm rarely plays well in politics -- particularly among the independent voters who typically decide elections," Cillizza wrote yesterday in The Fix. But he points out that the longer Palin is on the national stage the more sarcastic she has become. While that clearly works for her angry and disaffected Tea Party base, it holds little appeal for moderate Republicans and independents. For them, Cillizza noted, "It's likely to sow some doubts about whether she is up to the task of governing if she is elected to the nation's top office."



"The problem is, [Palin's] speeches are satisfying in the moment but they have no resonance -- because they're all about her," says Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic. And then he puts Palin on the couch and issues this masterful diagnosis. "Palin has the self-confidence of the millennial generation, and the fire of the baby boom generation, but she gives speeches like she's a Gen-X slacker. If she wants to be president, she has to channel the idealism of the boomers, and the sarcasm of Gen X, but focus them not on her enemies, or on the wrongs done to her, but on corruption in government. She's capable of this, but she doesn't seem to want to go there."

Bloomberg News's Margaret Carlson highlights why Palin can't go there in a piece for The Daily Beast. "Palin is like the warrior who could live without a friend but not without an enemy. Without foils, she would have almost nothing to say." And that's fine when your ultimate goal is to translate your adoring crowds into a powerful, yet unaccountable, perch on television and the speaking circuit from which to make political pronouncements, which leads to a more secure financial future for you and your family. That's why the person who should be watching his back is not President Obama. It's Glenn Beck.