During her gubernatorial campaign, Bitney said, he began predicting to Palin that she would make the short list of Republican Vice-Presidential prospects. “She had the biography, I told her, to be a contender,” he recalled. At first, Palin only laughed. But within a few months of being sworn in she and others in her circle noticed that a blogger named Adam Brickley had started a movement to draft her as Vice-President...
[Adam] Brickley registered a Web site—palinforvp.blogspot.com—which began getting attention in the conservative blogosphere. In the month before Palin was picked by McCain, Brickley said, his Web site was receiving about three thousand hits a day. Support for Palin had spread from one right-of-center Internet site to the next. First, the popular conservative blogger InstaPundit mentioned Brickley’s campaign. Then a site called the American Scene said that Palin was “very appealing”; another, Stop the A.C.L.U., described her as “a great choice.” The traditional conservative media soon got in on the act: The American Spectator embraced Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, praised her as “a babe.”
I think Palin has more of grievance than most, since certin of the blogging constituancy saw fit to drag her kids into the public eye with some truly bizarre charges. Also, you got to remember that Troopergate was partially blog driven (Andrew Halco) even before the VP nomination.
And, by the way, when has a politician ever praised the coverage they get in the media? That just never happens...
Well, if ever there was a woman who got to where she is on her own merit (as opposed to say Hillary and Dole), it's Palin. I doubt a website that gets 3K hits/day had much impact. And the stuff going around the blogosphere was particularly brutal. But where her real complaint should lie is that, unlike Obama, where the MSM thought it was their duty to debunk the worst of the blog smears, in her case the MSM worked to amplify the claims against her. It's as if the NY Times and MSNBC had started uncritically running pieces on Obama being a Muslim or not having a valid US birth certificate or being a closet communist agent. There was very little in the way of a filter between what became internet rumor and valid news piece (illustrated just recently by many MSMers being taken in by the internet hoax of McCain's fake advisor being the source of the Palin smears).
None of this, of course, makes her qualified to be president.
We all know that the New Yorker isn't biased or doesn't have a political agenda. Oh, that's right, it does have an agenda and while its articles are quite good, they also tend to be quite biased from a liberal perspective much like Dan.
Liberal, liberal, liberal Dan Drezner! First he's disloyal to George Bush, now he's disloyal to Sarah Palin. Also he's biased and has an agenda. A biased, disloyal, liberal agenda, too, and elitist also.
And Dan is a blogger, an evil, evil blogger. In pajamas, no less. Pajamas and TV!
Seriously, the more interviews Palin does post-election the less knowledgeable she appears. Given the Gibson/Couric starting point, that's damned impressive. By the time of Obama's inauguration, she may have regressed to grunting and drawing in the dirt.
And yet it was a blogger sitting in his basement, in his pajamas, who hoodwinked the press into thinking he was the high-ranking McCain advisor who was the source to rumors about Palin's apparent stupidity...
Given the context of Palin's remarks to Greta - questions about brutality on the trail, especially involving her kids - I think she was right on. A lot of those stories did start in the nebulous blogosphere, and were never corrected on air once they were found to be bull moose baloney.
The liberal illuminati can poke fun all they want, but it was the mainstream media who ended up looking like idiots out of all that - not Palin.
I don't know what it is about Palin that makes supposedly intelligent people shed IQ points. Governor Palin was governor long before the blogs picked her up. She got her position by working her way up from PTA to city council to mayor to a post on the Alaska oil and gas commission. She arrived at governor in a time honour political move, by sticking a shiv in her erstwhile patrons. Moreover, certain from Palin's statements before, during, and after the election that she is very proud of her state and really wants to govern it. It will be interesting in the next few years to see how she manages the pipeline project (built with her neighbors the Russians) and falling oil prices (no more $1300 cash payments to Alaskans). I predict she will do extremely well , you betcha!
The "dinosaurs were around at the same time as humans" story started as a hoax by a blogger. It made its way around many leftist blogs and was eventually made its way into an LA Times story.
Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
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