There is a truism in athletic circles, “You can’t coach speed”. Some very athletic people can run very fast, some other very athletic people cannot run fast and there isn’t a whole lot a coach or trainer can do about it. Speed is mostly a talent, it’s either there or it isn’t.
Politics is a very different sort of competition, but there are still inherent talents that make politics easier for a given individual. Bill Clinton, to take a famous example, is reported to have a real knack for remembering names and faces; as a result, even though he meets a lot of people, he can act like your bosom buddy and ask about your kids and your spouse. Along those lines, Clinton is also a famously adept public speaker. He can read the mood of his audience and hold the crowd in the palm of his hands. Some of that is simple practice, the man has given a lot of speeches, but he’s also fundamentally good at it. Sarah Palin is a very different politician than Bill Clinton, but there’s no denying that she has a lot of political talent. Anyone discounting her chances at higher office in the wake of last week’s results would do well to keep that in mind.
At the moment she is awkwardly caught between being a national punch line, a Republican scapegoat, and a promising future talent. That she was a poor vice-presidential pick is no longer being seriously debated, but that’s no fault of hers and long term it isn’t going to be held against her. John McCain made the pick, he lost the election and he’s the one who doesn’t get to run for President again (for all kinds of reasons). Palin certainly wasn’t ready for the intense glare of the national spotlight, but that does not mean she can never be ready, nor does the fact that she was a poor vice-presidential pick this year mean that she’s a poor politician.
Palin drew huge and enthusiastic crowds that listened to her words rapturously, she can still do that. Palin was able to connect with voters on a personal level, she can still do that too. Sarah Palin is an undeniably talented politician who wasn’t prepared this time around. She was laughably ill informed on basic national issues and very clearly did not have her house in order, in terms of the firing of her ex-brother-in-law, travel stipends for her family, and any number of other small time scandals. All of those things are correctable.
For starters, she needs to begin reading, a lot. Serious aspirants to national office need a casual and confident command of a dizzying array of issues, local, national and international. It’s not something that can be learned overnight or even in a month of intense study; the kind of knowledge she needs only comes from years of paying attention. She ought to have someone compile a daily Palin Paper, New York Times stories for international coverage, Washington Post stories for beltway insider stuff, and Wall Street Journal opinion and editorial pieces for ideological guidance. (Adding the sabbath gasbag shows to her TiVo would help as well.) If she spends an hour a day reading that for the next couple of years, with a healthy sprinkling of The National Review and a few other conservative rags thrown in for good measure, she’ll be able to skunk Katie Couric in an interview and turn the tables on Tina Fey.
Does that happen in 2012, 2016, some later year? No one knows. Speculation on that subject is laughably pointless at this time. No one knows what kind of legislation Barack Obama is going to be able to pass, or how he’s going to handle Iraq, Afghanistan, or a dozen other things; and no one has any clue what kind of real world effects those actions are going to have. But Sarah Palin is only forty-four years old. She could try in 2012 if things look promising or she could wait until 2016, 2020 or even later. She has national name recognition and the fundraising opportunities that come with it; her party’s base loves her and they are the people who vote in primaries; plus she’s already proved that she can expand her appeal beyond the base. Right after the Red convention she was popular outside her natural constituency and if she hadn’t flubbed those interviews so badly that could very well have stuck.
Sarah Palin is a talented, telegenic and ambitious politician. None of those things are going to change, and if she hits the books for a little while the electorate of the future isn’t going to care that once upon a time - way back in 2008 - she wasn’t ready to be vice-president.
