Choosing Sarah Palin's Successor

If Sarah Palin doesn't reconsider and run for president, Republican primary voters are going to have to choose from the remaining candidates. This selection process is difficult for two reasons. First, none of the candidates are Sarah Palin. Second, of the four or five best candidates two are viable and it's difficult to pick one over the other at this point. Either way, we are voting in a post Palin election this go around.

Without her in the race, we are back to the business as usual of choosing a nominee. Put the heart and soul back in the box and get out the dice and the handicapping sheet. We're not rooting on Secretariat here. We're simply picking a horse.

Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum are good conservatives. Unless they do something major in the next few weeks to get into the top tier, they will have a very tough time in the primaries. It has always been this writer's contention that if Sarah Palin was going to win or lose, it would be based on her campaign performance - not on what the media says about her. The same can be said for Santorum, Bachmann and Perry. It will take getting bodies into voting booths, but right now the numbers are not there.

Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann need to get more people to listen to their conservative messages. Rick Perry must undergo a major rehabilitation after his gaffe in this week's debate. Ron Paul resonates well on economic policy but is out of sync with the GOP on foreign policy. Huntsman is likeable, but he like Romney is seen as more of an establishment candidate at a time when many primary voters are looking for an anti-establishment candidate.

Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich are also good conservatives. They have been able to defy the odds and move themselves up into the top tier of candidates. As such, they are the most viable other than Romney. But one can't help but to be torn over picking a candidate since the best candidate by far has decided not to run.

As I was writing this, Michele Bachmann did an interview on Hannity, which I will now add to the quotes I already planned on using from Cain and Gingrich. We clearly would be better off with any of the candidates we have than Obama. But, dominating the game and bringing America back from such a deficit in this game is not as exciting nor is it as good of a shot as it could be since Palin won't be at the helm. Add a shameless request to reconsider here.

America is like the Denver Broncos. Barack Obama is Kyle Orton - horrible. Tim Tebow is a better quarterback. But he's not Aaron Rodgers. Since Sarah Palin is not running, we will not have Aaron Rodgers as our quarterback. Whoever the GOP chooses as its nominee would easily replace Obama as our quarterback. But we need to throw for a lot of yards and we need touchdowns fast.

So what do we do? We watch. We wait. We let the process play out. Governor Palin has said that eventually we will have the "most vetted candidate to come forth and rise to the surface."

So lets not kill each other over Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum or any of the other candidates. If you're backing a candidate then back them. But, let's look for the good in all of them. Let's not give the liberals fodder for the general election. Don't sweat the negative stuff. We may have our favorites and those we least favor, but we need to know the arguments for all of them. Yes, we need to discuss their weaknesses, too. But we need to remember that anything we say can and will be used against us in the court of public opinion come general election time.

Newt Gingrich has disavowed his couch affair with Nancy Pelosi. The Right Scoop picked up a great speech that Ginrich gave to his supporters yesterday.

The dumbest thing I've done in the last couple of years is sit on the couch with Nancy Pelosi. I was trying to send a signal and it failed (inaudible) and was foolish; it didn't work. People have misinterpreted that to suggest that I favor Cap and Trade. That is explicitely untrue. If anybody asks you about this, all of my testimony is on YouTube because I testified at the energy and commerce commission the same day as Al Gore. And I testified against the bill. I then helped lead the effort through American Solutions to beat the bill in the Senate. Cap and Trade is a totally irrational effort to centralize power in Washington, to give the Left control over our lives by using Carbon as the new excuse... If any of your friends ask you where I am on Cap and trade, I'm opposed to it.

Herman Cain successfully fought off the phantom charges of sexual harrassment on Neil Cavuto today. According to what Cain said on the video posted on The San Francisco Chronicle website, he scored major points about how the media works in using psychological warfare in order to place doubts into the minds of the voters and how voters are responding more positively now because the smear campaign is backfiring.

People who do not want me to get the nomination or become president - I don't know who these people are, it's probably a network of them - are behind this because they knew just what you indicated at the beginning of this interview. They knew that some people were going to believe the accusation, whether it was true or not. Let's take a little bit of shine off of Herman's star and see whether or not it will help to reduce the enthusiasm that people have. They knew that. So, they achieved that objective. But here's what backfired: more people believe me than the accusation. And they have demonstrated it with not only their verbal support - people wanted to volunteer; they have demonstrated it with their dollars.

Palin supporters can clearly relate to that. The media runs with stories based on anonymous sources and make the victim shadow box it. It's not important whether the story is true or not, but whether it can have enough of a psychological impact on voters so as to knock down their level of acceptance on a candidate. This was always the strategy of the Left when they feared Palin would run for president. You can see that what is happening with Cain is similar to what happened with Palin. It's helping to galvanize his supporters.

The intent is obvious. Isn't it funny how all of a sudden Sarah Palin is no longer a dumb bimbo who is unelectable? Where are the daily hit pieces from the Huffington Post and Politico? Their writers must have been told to focus on Cain now and just reprint stuff from the Bush and Palin files and update the fill in the blank parts with more timely material.

Michelle Bachmann nailed it on Hannity last night.

I think that conservatives are tired of seeing us attacked. They've seen it happen. They know that it's completely unfair. They know that the media's biased. That's why I think that the media has completely lost the faith of the average American. And that's why I really know that in this 2012 election, we have more than a chance to win. We're going to win. And that's why we can't settle on anything less than a true core conservative because people aren't going to listen to this biased media anymore, are they? You heard that last night. They're not going to listen to the media. They're going to make up their own mind.

We are not running against Obama. We are running against the media. If we tear each other up now and don't stand up to the media lies, we lose.

Eventually, we're going to have to argue on behalf of one of these folks in the general. 

I'm not endorsing anyone for president just yet. I'm just saying that we should not be like the rest of the weak kneed, trembling tiger Republicans who didn't come to the aid of Sarah Palin when she was being destroyed. We're trained in spotting and debunking media lies. And if they do it to Bachmann, Cain or Gingrich, we need to recognize that and not become like them. Standing for something is a lot better than standing against something. If you have to destroy another candidate to advance yours, you're doing it wrong.

Let's not help them pick our nominee. More importantly, let's not help them with their opposition research. All of our candidates are flawed and we know it. But someday, we're all going to have to back the nominee, even if it's the one we bashed in the primaries. We better not have to flip flop.