It was a year ago last Saturday that Sarah Palin walked onto the national stage and raised us up. Those of us who were fed up with a limp GOP moving center left were thrilled with a principled conservative, a rugged, individualist vice presidential pick. It saved a McCain campaign that had been on life support.
John McCain had it right when introducing her. He said, “She’s exactly what we need, she’s exactly what this country needs.” Bingo.
There is no artifice with this woman. You couldn’t write a more perfect resume. Raising her kids, involved in the PTA, elected mayor of her hometown (where she stopped wasteful spending and cut property taxes), elected to the oil and gas commission (where she stood up to lobbyists, special interests, the old boy network). The rest is history.
What a year it has been for her and us. Looking back in hindsight, could the differences between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama be more stark? Obama is all artifice. Palin is all real, all that. Obama is all style. Palin is all substance. Obama is anti-American. Palin is all-American. Obama holds the U.S. military in contempt. Palin reveres the military. The military loves Palin. The military is on to Obama. The corrupt activist media loves Obama. The corrupt activist media loathes and libels Palin.
Despite the attacks and lawsuits by freaks in Alaska working for Obama’s hatchet men, Palin perseveres. Hampered by the ethics lawsuits, and attrition, she moved on to take on the enemy within, here, on the front lines. When Palin made her “farewell” speech last month, I wrote in The American Thinker that her speech was no farewell address at all, but a commencement address. “I will fight even harder for you, for what is right and for the truth,” she promised. “And I have never felt I needed a title to do that!”
Her speech embodied what a great American sounds like, and what a president ought to sound like. Palin made no apologies. She said nothing like Obama’s inane drone of “America’s best days are behind us.” No tearing down of our nation. Obama ranks on us; Palin raises us up and speaks of national pride.
Palin is all content. Obama is all about playing the race card. The Obama mop up will be huge. The Republicans are going to need a “real” genuine article; that’s our girl Sarah, plain and tall.
Palin has wasted no time in taking on the big boys yet again, and winning. No slave to the leftist feudal media caste system, Palin circumvents the O-propagandists and disinformationalists. Palin, alone, with her Facebook page as her unfiltered messenger, calls out the rotting, decaying vultures in D.C. on their death panels — and they recoil to their nests and pull the death panels out of Obamacare legislation. Palin, alone, on her unedited Facebook page, declares that there should be no healthcare reform without tort reform, and she gets Howard Dean to confess they won’t take on the lawyers. You can’t make this stuff up.
She’s a marvel and wonderful to watch. She is a lioness.
Many of us saw the divergent paths America would take with the 2008 election of a radical or the election of a patriot. America, in the well-intentioned interest of putting the first black man in the White House, never looked beyond color to content of character.
America fell for the smooth talking boulevardier, like an impressionable school girl. But once you’ve had one of those, you run the other way.
I suspect America will be running far and fast from the destroying Democrats into the arms of the pure and the good. When the pendulum swings, its swings hard and fast. Sarah Palin embodies what an American is. She is what Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin envisioned when they carved out the American idea.
Anyone who wants write her off, proceed at your own risk.
The more evil succeeds and overwhelms our foreign and domestic policy, our culture, our discourse and the very social fabric of our lives, the clearer it becomes that Palin is the antidote, the answer to fighting this morally bankrupt sewer in which we find ourselves during the Obama administration.
Happy first anniversary, Sarah. Looking forward to the next four, and especially to the eight after that.
Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs Web site and former associate publisher of the New York Observer. Her Op-Eds have appeared in the Washington Times, Newsmax, Human Events, WorldNetDaily, the American Thinker, Israel National News, and other publications.