One more round with Josh. I did indeed read his piece which contained nothing new, except an intriguing angle that Palin lost an opportunity to turn her massive tax-and-redistribute plan for the oil companies in Alaska into a national program. In his response, Josh argues she could have proposed a similar plan for Wall Street. But does Josh really believe that a big new tax for Big Finance would have worked as a campaign theme for the Republicans in 2008? Wall Street at the time was reeling, and McCain famously backed TARP. My view is that this is grasping at straws, not so much counter-intuitive as counter-factual.
Josh takes one policy legacy and ignores the reams of evidence that she abused her office on personal vendettas, could not rid herself of congenital lying, played culture war politics from the first moment she entered politics, and left her state in the lurch halfway through her first term. Palin is what she always was. Part of what she is and was is contemptuous of sage advice and bored by policy. She had no superpowers but great performance skills and empowering resentment. It just so happened that those abilities met a rare moment in Alaskan politics and the tax was passed. But the notion that she could then don a new persona and help the country is simply at odds with who she is.
Steve Schmidt swiftly discovered to his horror what Josh has still not absorbed. Palin is Palin. Her character and attitudes have barely changed since high school. She is increasingly despised in Alaska because Alaskans know this, and live in her wake. Josh managed to go all that way to assert the opposite. Apart from making John McCain feel marginally better, I see no point to this alternate universe fantasy.
The Dish 