Sarah Palin in 2012? Dear God Help Us All!

With the presidential election finally coming to close tomorrow, and Barack Obama seemingly on the verge of victory (crosses fingers), there is a ton of speculation that Sarah Palin will run for president in 2012. Now I don't doubt that if she loses this election (crosses fingers again) she will try for the Republican nomination in the next go around, but I highly doubt she will get it. The majority of her support comes from what is considered to be the base of the party, ultra-conservative, white, rural, evangelical Christians, but as evidenced in this past primary season, the Republican party is a fractious group trying to find its identity. McCain had won the nomination only by default. The media, being friends with McCain, essentially spun it as the party deciding it was now his time, that he paid his dues and now deserves their support. When he won the South Carolina primary, the media claimed the state's Republicans felt they owed McCain, after the vicious 2000 primary when they passed him over for Bush, but in reality he got about the same percentage of the vote this year as he did in 2000. McCain only won it because the rest of the vote was fractured between Huckabee and Romney, rather than coalesced behind one candidate. The party was essentially divided into two camps, a populist, grassroots evangelical christian group who supported Huckabee, and the traditional fiscal conservatives and party elders who grouped around Romney. Huckabees people wouldn't support Romney because he was Mormon, and Romney's people wouldn't support Huckabee because he was a populist who felt government should do more to help the poor. It was a fracture of the coalition Reagan assembled in the late 70s and early 80s which led to his presidency, and I'm actually surprised that it took this long for the fracture to occur, because from a historical perspective, these were two groups that were always in opposition to each other with two separate goals. The Republican party, however, managed to join them together by creating a social identity for themselves. They were the pro-America party, the small town values party, the Christian party - basically the party who would protect America from liberals and their causes. The party elders and fiscal conservatives would placate evangelical Christians by saying how they would bring God back into government, they would bring back school prayer, overturn Roe vs. Wade, and make schools teach Creationism/Intelligent Design, none of which they actually did, while convincing them that what they wanted was small government, i.e. tax cuts for corporations, the repeal of the estate tax, deregulation of banking and insurance institutions, which hey, they actually did. By merging these two groups and their separate values, I think the Republican party actually created another group, which serves as its actual base and its reason for winning multiple elections - AWMs, angry white males. These were men who were convinced they were somehow losing out. Even though they actually support a larger government, since they stilll want their Social Security and Medicaid once they get old, they want the federal government to fix their roads and bridges, and when a disaster happens they want aid from the government to rebuild, AWMs are dramatically opposed to big government, because what big government represents is hard-working middle class white people being overtaxed, in order for the government to give free money out to poor black people so they don't have to work. Republicans have convinced AWMs this is why they pay so much in taxes, and not because they are being screwed over by large corporations who get tax reductions and in turn still pay their workers minimally. So where was I going with this? AWMs who make up the base of the party aren't going to support Sarah Palin. Sure they supported her this go around, but that's only because she was for vice-president, and really it was more that she was running for first lady, since many in the party weren't too warm to Cindy McCain, who can come off as elitist. Palin can rally the base to support another candidate, she can be the attack dog, being a voice for the odd concerns and fears of the AWMs, but in the end, I really don't think they'd line up in support of a woman at the top of the ticket, which is why I believe she won't be the nominee, God willing.