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No, She Can’t

An October Gallup poll put Ms. Palin’s favorable number at 40%, her lowest rating to date. In a November Gallup survey, 63% of all voters said they wouldn’t seriously consider supporting her for the presidency. Yet Ms. Palin isn’t as unpopular as John Edwards, and she has a higher approval rating than Nancy Pelosi. ~Matthew […]

An October Gallup poll put Ms. Palin’s favorable number at 40%, her lowest rating to date. In a November Gallup survey, 63% of all voters said they wouldn’t seriously consider supporting her for the presidency.

Yet Ms. Palin isn’t as unpopular as John Edwards, and she has a higher approval rating than Nancy Pelosi. ~Matthew Continetti

And people tell me that I’m a bad salesman! I can see it now: Vote Palin in ’12, because at least she isn’t Nancy Pelosi. What can it mean to say that someone isn’t as unpopular as a man who cheated on his dying wife? She probably isn’t as unpopular as Mark Sanford, either. That doesn’t make her a viable national candidate. The best part is when Continetti cites her net negative approval ratings among independents and then claims that this is what gives her a chance in national politics.

It’s not really Continetti’s fault that his case for Palin is so terrible. Yes, he has chosen for some bizarre reason to become the leading professional shill for a no-hoper ex-politician whom most Americans don’t like, but he’s doing his best to put a positive spin on simply atrocious polling numbers. If 63% of all voters wouldn’t even seriously consider Palin for President, how much less support would she actually get when it came time to vote?

The problem with Continetti’s “solution” for Palin is that she has no interest in abandoning her pseudo-populist politics of cultural resentment and returning to her less combative reformer persona. The pseudo-populism is what made her a movement conservative folk hero, this is what generated the intense backlash against her, and this is what won her a big book deal. The things that made her appealing to Alaskan voters cut against the grain of the movement and the party. She once prided herself on challenging and going against her party, but this is exactly why activists hated John McCain. Her idea of being anti-establishment in Alaska meant hiking taxes on oil companies, which would be completely unacceptable to movement and party activists if she tried it on a national level.

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