1 Boring Old Man

No, I’m not going to declare Mark Sanford and Sarah Palin are crazy Republican Governors ergo Republicans are crazy. After all, the Democrats had Eliot Spitzer and Rod Blagojevich. I’m not even going to claim Governors are crazy [even though that is 8% of our Governors]. But I do think that a few comments are in order about disrespect of elected office.

Mark Sanford talks about his office as Governor as a "therapy" for him – a way to redeem the trust of his wife and the South Carolinians he serves. He said he thought about resigning, but then decided that he would take the high road and face the music. That seems to me to be an amazingly self-serving way to look at public office. It’s not about him and his moral or spiritual growth, being Governor. It’s about running the State of South Carolina – a state has the third highest unemployment in the country, and is in big trouble. Sanford’s reign has been no great shakes before these last several weeks, mostly characterized by conservative rhetoric with little else. Now, he’s paralyzed and making a public fool of himself [I went surfing for someone to quote who thinks Mark Sanford should continue in public office, but came up empty-handed].

Sarah Palin was inaugurated Governor of Alaska on December 4th, 2006. She was announced to be John McCain’s running mate on August 29th, 2008 – a campaign that lasted until November 2nd, 2008. Today, she resigned as Governor effective July 26, 2009. Taking time out to run for Vice President and now leaving early, that means she actually served 37% of her term. She doesn’t seem to have spent much time in the public service to the people who elected her. She butchers the Kings English. ["We know we can affect positive change outside government at this point in time on another scale and actually make a difference for our priorities,"] There is little question that she would not even be a political contender except for her "cutsie" persona. Palin was "discovered" by William Kristol, editor for the ultra [neo]Conservative Weekly Standard while on an Alaska Cruise. His take on her resignation?

"My contrarian take is almost everyone I talk to thinks it’s crazy but I wonder maybe it’s crazy like a fox," said Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, who has been out defending Palin this past week. Kristol’s view is that spending another 18 months in office in Alaska will not persuade skeptics that she’s ready to be president. Instead, he said, she can use this time to travel the country and the world, to immerse herself in policy issues and to campaign for Republican candidates, without facing questions every time she leaves her state about whether she is shirking her responsibilities.

Surreality Only Beginning
By Josh Marshall

As David noted below, many commentators have taken little more than an hour to proceed from slack-jawed bewilderment to belief that Sarah Palin’s unexplained resignation may be a political masterstroke.

For the moment there’s no clear evidence of or explanation for some massive political or scandal bombshell that would have driven Palin from office. And it can be difficult not to allow the preposterous to become credible when many supposedly rational people are saying it.

But logic and common sense seldom fail as a guide to understanding politics. And the idea that Gov. Palin just up and decided for no reason in particular to resign her office little more than half way through her term, with a hastily assembled press conference and a rambling and histrionic speech, is just too silly for serious consideration. Another sign of the confusion on the inside are the comments reporters are getting from supposed Palin insiders. Palin insiders told Andrew Mitchell that Palin was “out of politics for good.” But she told the Executive Director of the Republican Governors Association that she’s resigning to campaign for more candidates in the continental US, work on her book, all with an eye to gearing up for her run for president in 2012. Call me cynical but it seems hard to reconcile those two explanations.

As with her speech itself, the tell is that the decision was apparently so rushed and sudden that there was not enough time to come up with a plausible cover story or to get out the word about what it was.

It looks like a duck and quacks like a duck. Either Palin is resigning ahead of some titanic scandal [which should emerge in short order if it exists] or her resignation was triggered by an even more extreme mental instability than we’d previously suspected.