Making Sense of Sarah: Mission Impossible

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If I understand the cruxt of Sarah Palin's argument, she's saying that it might be tempting to "just keep your head down and plod along. but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out." Sarah Palin said as she announced that she was quitting. So if you stay, you're not quitting but you are taking the quitters way out? -- But if you quit .......you're........you're..... hang on...if you quit, UGH! - Do you see what I mean? -- I get dizzy listening to Palin speak. However, Palin isn't alone.

Over the passed 6 months, there has been a Republican exodus vis-a-vis resigining for a more noble cause I suppose. Sarah Palin said she was stepping down because "only dead fish 'go with the flow.' " But far from swimming upstream, she's the latest proof that for Republicans in government, the tide is out.

Look at the 2009 toll so far. One 2012 Republican wannabe, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, announced he would not seek re-election next year. One of the top woulda-beens, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, quit his job to join the Obama administration and left the country and the hemisphere Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter quit the party. Last month, Nevada Sen. John Ensign had to resign his Republican leadership post to spend more time with his sex scandal. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford resigned as head of the Republican Governors Association. After this week's disastrous AP interview, Sanford soon may have to step down as governor as well. As his Argentine mistress said, you can't "put the genius back in the bottle."

When did the GOP become such a bunch of quitters? What ever happened to the party of Larry Craig and his you'll-never-take-me-from-this-stall-alive spirit?

Some Republican strategists insist that resignation has its virtues. Mary Matalin told the New York Times that Palin's "

brilliant" move will free her to camp out alongside Mitt Romney on the campaign trail. Certainly, we can all relish the next two years of watching the Romney and Palin broods go five-on-five across the heartland. But Romney himself is proof that quitting is no way to win. In 2006, he passed up a second term so he could campaign full-time in Iowa and New Hampshire. He lost them both.

The fallacy that successful presidential candidates are too busy to govern dates back to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, who won the presidency as former governors. Yet neither Carter nor Reagan were quitters. Carter couldn't run for re-election in 1974 because in those days, Georgia governors were limited to one term. Reagan served two full terms as governor of California.
In the last 20 years, perseverers have prospered while quitters withered. Bill Clinton won a fifth term as governor of Arkansas before launching his 1992 campaign. George W. Bush won a second term in Texas two years before running for president in 2000.

Compare that with the dismal track record of strategic quitters. In 1986, Gary Hart chose not to run for a third Senate term and went on to meet Donna Rice. In 2004, John Edwards passed up a second Senate term and went on to meet Rielle Hunter.

Bill Bradley's decision not to seek a fourth term in 1996 helped cost him the Democratic nomination in 2000 to Al Gore, whose slogan was "stand and fight." Bob Dole's spectacular resignation from the Senate after he clinched the Republican nomination in June 1996 earned his campaign a few days of good press. But when his White House bid was over, Dole no longer had the Senate job he had loved.

Time after time, quitting has turned out to be the "worthless, easy path" that Sarah Palin insists it isn't. What makes her sudden resignation especially troubling, though, is not the flawed strategy so much as her jubilation and relief in putting the statehouse in her rear mirror. Palin's resignation is a symptom of what's crippling the Republican Party of late: Governing has become an unwelcome distraction.

Like Sanford's fatal press conference, Palin's bitter

statement reads like a cry for help—an all-caps plea for someone to rescue her from the messy business of running Alaska. She passes up running for re-election because she doesn't need a title "to HELP people," then says she'll pack it in altogether rather than "milk" her lame-duck status by traveling to the Lower 48. Like Sanford, Palin snuck away to visit a distant land and fell in love with a siren she cannot bring home or leave behind. Her fatal attraction was the national spotlight.

Palin closed her statement with words she attributed to Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction." Right war, wrong general: The man who said those words was Oliver Smith, who helped his men escape annihilation at the Battle of the "Frozen Chosin" Reservoir in Korea. She should be so lucky. For Sarah Palin, avoiding disaster continues to be a losing battle.

Sanford Puts Mistress Ahead Of Wife And Children In Apology

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Gov. Mark Sanford pictured above with the family that he obviously cares little about, admitted Wednesday he's been having an affair with a woman he visited on a secret trip to Argentina. What most in the media didn’t catch was that when Sanford tearfully ran down the list of the many people that he hurt, he put his mistress first even before his wife and children. He also said he'll resign as head of the Republican Governors Association, but of course not a peep about resigning as Governor. Yet again another republican so righteous about the sins of his collogues, but not willing to practice what they preach.

"I've let down a lot of people, that's the bottom line," Sanford said at a news conference. He said he's known the woman about eight years, but their relationship turned into something more a year ago while he was on an economic development trip to Argentina.

Sanford, a 49-year-old father of four, choked up during remarks to reporters. He said his wife has known about the affair for the last five months. Sanford revealed Wednesday morning that he'd gone to Argentina for a seven-day trip. For two days after reporters starting asking questions, his office had said he had gone hiking on the Appalachian Trial.
Meanwhile, first lady Jenny Sanford had told The Associated Press she did not know where her husband went for the Father's Day weekend.

First elected governor in 2002, the former real estate developer has more than year remaining in his second term and is barred by state law from running again. A former three-term congressman, Sanford most recently snared headlines for his unsuccessful fight to turn aside federal stimulus cash for his state's schools. His vocal battle against the Obama administration — and libertarian, small-government leanings — won praise from conservative pundits. Ultimately, a state court order required him to take the money.

Sanford's announcement came a day after another prominent Republican, Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, apologized to his GOP Senate colleagues after revealing last week that he had an affair with a campaign staffer and was resigning from the GOP leadership.

Sanford was born May 28, 1960, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the eldest of four siblings. He earned a bachelor's degree in business from Furman University in 1983 and a master's of business administration from the University of Virginia in 1988.

After working for a couple of years in the financial world in New York, he returned to South Carolina and said he was shaped by his summers working on the family plantation. He served in the U.S. House for three terms before honoring a term limits pledge and leaving office in 2001.

In 2002, he defeated incumbent Democrat Jim Hodges by 4 percentage points to become governor and won re-election in 2006, beating Democratic state Sen. Tommy Moore.

Needless to say, the private detective industry is going to have their hands full with the many republican wives suddenly in need of their services.

Chico Brisbane