Jackie Danicki

You can validly level a number of serious charges at the woman, but being boring isn’t one of them. Anyway, the stuff I’m posting here is very different from anything I’ve read or heard about Palin in most places. Over at our beauty blog, Hillary is on a roll.

This is a woman who probably learned what it felt like to lead on a high school basketball team. Her next stop was the PTA, and from there, the City Council. I used to be a small town journalist, and I’ve met politicians just like her. There are a surprising number of them out there, people who step up and put one foot in front of the other and do the one right thing at a time, for one right reason at a time; in whom the necessity of ambition unfurls slowly, naturally, indistinguishably from the issues themselves. They are rarely partisan. I’ve also met the incumbents, cronies, gadflies and critics who take up an awful lot of space in local politics, infusing them with incompetence, apathy, the most pedestrian forms of corruption, and even a taint of actual lunacy. Challenge them and you will get a lot of grief.

Palin puts me in mind a bit of Kevin Johnson, the NBA star and community activist who is now running for mayor of Sacramento. He too is a controversial figure, with as many detractors as champions, and he is being turned inside out publicly while taking on an incumbent mayor whose main shortcoming seems to be that she’s no Kevin Johnson, ie, she is a mediocrity.

[…]

The willingness to be disliked is one of the only clear signals that a politician is sincere. And according to Matt Welch, on Reason Hit and Run, Sarah Palin is roundly despised by close to 100% of Alaska’s Republican establishment. She also has something like an 80% approval rating with Alaskans. Taken together, those are about the best numbers any politician could have.

I think even those with the most frothing hatred for Palin would concede Hillary’s point about her natural abilities as a leader, and as a fearless one at that, for I think that is precisely what has them so terrified of this woman. (I’m no more or less scared of her than I am of the Democrats. What’s that saying - “Same shit, different smell”? Yeah, that about covers it.)

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