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Palin resigns. Seriously.

By

Sarah Palin has announced that she is resigning as the Governor of Alaska.

She didn’t say why she decided to step down, but the surprise announcement stirred speculation that she would focus on a bid for the 2012 Republican nomination for president.

The former Republican vice presidential candidate made the announcement from her home in suburban Wasilla on Friday morning. She said she would step down July 26.

This is a great move – if she stayed Governor, she’d have a bunch of experience by 2012, and that would make her all insidery and stuff.  Now she can tour the country with likely running mate Joe the Plumber and talk about Bill Ayers.  You betcha!

UPDATE: Oh my God.  I just heard a snippet of her press conference on NPR.  She’s babbling almost as incoherently as she did in the Katie Couric interview.  WTF??

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    • Most Governors are.  If the presidency is her goal why not simply decline to seek re-election?

      • She actually opened her remarks with a crack about lame-duck governors who head out on foreign-trade missions on the taxpayers’ dime.

        <

        p>The whole thing was simply incoherent, a collection of nonsequiters. Vintage Sarah, if you can stomach that sort of thing unmediated by Tina Fey.

  2. … a tough bind.  If she stays governor, she can possibly build her resume some more.  But if she does the traveling necessary to run while holding office, she’ll be lambasted in her own state as an absentee.  The correct choice for here would have been to get reelected and vie for 1216.  I wonder if she had serious doubts about reelection or her ability to actually accomplish much for Alaska (limiting the usefulness of the office for building her resume).

    • if she ran for the 1216 nomination.

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      p>More seriously, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell says her sources have Palin leaving politics entirely.  Perhaps we won’t have her to kick around anymore — in Nixon’s case “any more” amounted to six years.

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      p>I actually thought during the 2008 campaign that she would not finish her term as governor because she’d be impeached — I figured the extra scrutiny from the nomination would uncover something actually criminal.  Of course we don’t know whether there’s more news coming.  Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, perhaps?

      • She has little in common with Romney. And why are so many posters here so suspicious of her?  I like attractive and balsy women!

        • but I am not suspicious of Palin, I know what she is and I don’t like it.

    • Her term ends in 2010 anyway, giving her plenty of time to travel in 2011 to campaign for 2012.  All she’d have had to do was decide not to run for re-election as Governor in 2010 – and if she’s not running for re-election then complaints of absenteeism wouldn’t be as prominent anyway.  If Lt. Gov Sean Parnell were running to replace her, leaving him in charge more often while she’s away could even be seen as a good thing for her to do.

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      p>There’s gotta be some other reason.

      • … this is getting suspicious.  Her husband’s AIP ties have been in the news recently.  I wonder if someone has found another shoe to drop.  Admittedly idle speculation.

        • Can she possibly think this decision will help her in 2012?  If you can’t take the heat from bloggers and David Letterman (supposedly part of the reason she’s resigning) how are you going to face up to foreign threats?  This is all very strange.  

  3. That was incoherent even for her. Throw some metaphors in a blender and see what comes out. Interesting timing, probably the slowest news day in the whole Summer. (nice to see Sun in Alaska, can’t wait for it to get here.)

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    p>I didn’t hear a real reason for quitting, other than she didn’t want to be a lame duck governor traveling around on the taxpayer dime. Huh? (Pull a Mitt and travel around on donors dimes)

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    p>Possible reasons:

    <

    p>1. Big new job down this way. Faux News?
    2. Run for President 3 years from now
    3. Tired of politics/wants to protect family from liberal bloggers
    4. Just doesn’t want to be Governor of Alaska anymore
    5. Scandal/indictment coming

    <

    p>Anything else?

    <

    p>I’m betting on 1, 4, or 5. I don’t see any reason to quit now to run for Prez when your term’s up in 2010. And people were a lot meaner to her and her family LAST year. The new Vanity Fair article wasn’t that bad. Her base would probably love it; if they, like, would actually read something called Vanity Fair.

    <

    p>I don’t see this as a brilliant political move.

    <

    p>Regardless. Happy 4th of July!!!!!!!

    <

    p>

    • I disagree with waiting for 2016 for Governor Palin. The Republican base loves Palin and 2016 is too long to wait. She needs to cash her popularity chips while she’s still popular and before she loses that popularity or someone new comes in and becomes more popular.

      <

      p>Second, Palin could use the time off to travel across the country to campaign during the 2010 Congressional mid-term elections. Campaigning during the 2010 elections, it will be practice for the 2012 election and it will garner many IOUs too.

      • Why quit NOW if you’re running in 2012. You’re not running yourself in 2010, so go campaign for everybody else. Then you’ve still got 2 years to campaign for 2012. It’s what Mitt did, and she’s way more popular with the Republican base than he will ever be. Bugging out early get you what?

        <

        p>This was too hurried, too incoherent, and too weird to be a political move. It felt like she decided this morning to do this.

        <

        p>Course this could be one of those mavericky things she learned from McCain. Sorta like suspending your campaign to save the country, or not taking stimulus money to save Alaskan’s freedoms.

        <

        p>Happy 4th! Especially now.

        • If Gov. Palin was not going to seek re-election in 2010, when do you think it would have been appropriate to make that announcement?

      • “She needs to cash her popularity chips while she’s still popular” with a very, very small subset of the country. For everyone else, she’s about as popular as Dick Cheney.  

    • … if she can land a highly visible punditry sort of position somewhere and milk it for years before she gets in real campaign mode, it might arguably be better for cultivating more fans than anything she could do in Alaska.  More to the point, much of what she might do to cultivate more fans while allegedly governing in Alaska could compromise her popularity and effectiveness in Alaska anyway, effectively undercutting her efforts.  Isn’t trying to stay relevant in punditocracy exactly what Hukabee is doing?  

      • The risk for anyone wanting to go from candidate, to pundit, and back again, is that in the process of staying relevant you have to continually give your opinion on all sorts of topics and it helps to be edgy.  Any time you aren’t knowledgeable, or become too edgy, or otherwise make a fool of yourself, it’s all on camera.  When you go back to being a candidate you may as well tie a bow to your your lesser tv moments and mail it to the opposition.

        • …, if this is the plan it isn’t without risks.  It still might be workable.  Especially if you (mistakenly) bought into the ‘stoke the base’ strategy to electoral victory that the GOP has employed.

          • is usually the correct one. The other shoe will drop soon. Just you wait 😉

            <

            p>(If they lied to the FBI about the AIP during the background checks, that would just be delicious — and if it’s AIP related, that could explain why McCain’s camp released all those emails last week, to distance themselves, suggesting she was willing to lie about it, while they weren’t.)

  4. In the interest of bipartisanship.

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    p>That might account for why she seemed so flustered.

    <

    p>Now, what might that position be?

      • If you click long enough — and hopefully your mouse remains functional! — you eventually end up at Huffington Post article from an Alaskan journalist.

        <

        p>The sports complex and the Palin house construction have always been suspicious. It seems plausible to me that she or Todd is facing an indictment on this score.

        <

        p>That said, I think we’re trying to learn Monday’s news on Saturday. Better to wait than speculate. Curiosity, be still!

  7. Corruption probe.

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    p>

    Many political observers in Alaska are fixated on rumors that federal investigators have been seizing paperwork from SBS in recent months, searching for evidence that Palin and her husband Todd steered lucrative contracts to the well-connected company in exchange for gifts like the construction of their home on pristine Lake Lucille in 2002. The home was built just two months before Palin began campaigning for governor, a job which would have provided her enhanced power to grant building contracts in the wide-open state.

    <

    p>Would explain the incoherent babbling… deer caught in headlights.

      • aside that you may like the link better… it’s basically the same theory. a house (super duper allegedly) was built in exchange for lucrative contracts. some of the details were different in the separate links, but same gist.

        <

        p>And that’s all we’ve got right now. It’s all idle speculation. We’re no better than people at the water cooler. The only difference is we’re posting our comments online. It’s a bigger water cooler.

        <

        p>I’ve long since said that the blogosphere is just a series of conversations. Yes, it’s the sharing of news and facts, but those news and facts are made as we write (and read) it. I don’t think the people who initially asked “what if?” about Palin’s baby are any different, better or worse from us.  

  9. I agree with the other commenters that something is about to break.

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    p>I can think of no reason to drop a bombshell like this on a Friday afternoon before a July 4th holiday except to get out of something with as little damage as possible. Her comments appear to be unscripted, the entire thing has been pulled together at the last moment, and the timing of the announcement seems calculated (if that’s the word) to either (a) minimize the exposure of the announcement, or (b) try to “get ahead” of some other story.

    <

    p>Stick a fork in her, she’s done.

  10. The 2012 GOPers are dropping like flies. I guess that leaves us with Romney by default.

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    p>Their only electable candidate-Hunstman, was taken by Obama. Guiliani is running either for Gov or Sen in NY so he can’t run, leaving us with the Huckster who will likely prefer to be on TV, and the Mittster barring a Jeb Bush comeback.

    <

    p>Luckily the base doesn’t trust Mitt so we won’t have to deal with him vs Obama. While in theory Mitt should be easy to beat, I worry that if the economy is still bad in 2012 he could morph back into CEO/Manager mode while toning down his conservative rhetoric and look like that years pragmatic centrist. On the other hand to win the GOP nomination he has to appeal to all the crazies.

    <

    p>Seriously that party has marginalized itself into a corner and lacking any coherent strategy to appeal to minorities, voters in cities, or independents I cannot see it leaving the electoral wilderness for quite sometime. And unlike the 12 year period of the Reagan-Bush administration when at least the Dems always had Congress, the Republicans have nothing.

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