Palin 2012 Update!

So how comes the Sarah Palin juggernaut?  Is she still a force in the 2012 election? I haven’t touched on the Republican candidates for a while now, because I think most of them realize that it is unwise to overexpose themselves this early.  Most of the major potential candidates have a decent amount of experience behind them, have excellent resumes, and realize that coming out right now just gives them a greater chance for slip-ups.  Romney has been almost nonexistent from the headlines, Huckabee is doing a mostly-innocuous show for Fox and deftly sidestepped the murder of the four Seattle police officers by a criminal whom he himself paroled (which, to be fair, wasn’t really his fault in the first place), and Bobby Jindal has apparently ruled out running.

Naturally, Sarah Palin is staying in the spotlight.  Which she kind of has to.  The anti-Obama movement needs populist leaders at the moment, and it seems the two heroes of the movement are legendary moron Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.  And hey, Palin’s nothing if not a populist leader.

I think I’ve stated this on the blog before, if not somewhere else:  Palin is picking up steam among her constituency, but there is not a chance of her winning the 2012 election.  Note:  I do think there is at least a decent chance that a Republican could win the election, given a few circumstances over 2 years remaining until things start to pick up again, but I do not think Sarah Palin has a choice.  Why?  Because the amount of support for her in the United States is not as wide as people tend to think they are.

Reporting on protests is notorious for misrepresenting actual numbers.  You take the anti-Vietnam and anti-Iraq war protests that dominated news in their respective eras, and they made it look like the entire country was at arms, when in reality, while a majority of the country may have been against the war, most of them weren’t doing much about it.  And being against certain policies does not translate into votes for the other side, necessarily.

Here’s the fact, and I will give you that this study I am citing is a few years old, but 15% of the electorate is part of the Religious Right.  Most of these will vote for Sarah Palin, probably.  Of the U.S. electorate, 34% of the population considers itself “conservative,” whereas 21% considers itself “liberal.”  Now, of that remaining 45%, a large chunk of it is middle-of-the-road, and that is who really matters.  Sarah Palin doesn’t have much appeal even in the center of the right.  In situations where she ran for president in 2012 against Obama, with her being the only other major candidate, she would not have a chance.  15% of the electorate won’t do it, and there are a lot of Reagan Republicans who would absolutely not vote for her.  I mean, even Peggy Noonan called her an idiot.

There has to be a growing unease in the Republican party about this.  While a lot of them like Sarah Palin personally, it can’t be comforting to see her as a frontrunner in 2012.  She could take serious votes away from a more viable candidate like Romney, and she has the gonads to split off and run as a separate candidate in 2012, honestly.  I don’t think she will, but she might have no choice but to go with the tides on that one.

Basically, here’s what I expect:

-The Republicans are going to see Romney and Huckabee battling it out.  Maybe Boehner, but that guy’s an ass, he doesn’t have much of a chance.  Palin will take votes from Huckabee.  Not enough to beat Huckabee, but enough to give Romney a leg up on the both of them.  Romney will come through, unless in the next year or so we see a phenom who has a chance at beating Obama.

-Even with Obama’s shaky record right now, it’s going to take a serious juggernaut to beat him, barring any massive catastrophes.  We’ll just see how it turns out.

-As long as Palin keeps making hypocritical, moronic comments about how Rush Limbaugh is allowed to say “retard” but Rahm Emanuel can’t, she’s shooting herself in the foot.  Bye-bye Sarah.