Sara. Sara. Everywhere it’s Sara.
Everyone knows it’s absurd. Lazarus was only a story. Right?
Palin had been seriously hurt, some said buried, in her race for the vice presidency in 2008, compounded later by her decision to walk away from the Alaska Govenorship. But she’d stayed in touch with the core of admirers she’d attracted in her run with McCain in ’08. And here she was emerging again as the Republican front runner.
And nobody is laughing.
She remains the party’s lone rainmaker and the ultimate fulfillment of women’s rights with a charismatic style that turns Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson into stone men, Mike Huckabee into a carnie barker, Mark Sanford and John Ensign into sexual caricatures. Her autobiography came out in November ’09 and was a runaway best seller, just a month after Barrack Obama had made his prestige-laden trip to support Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympic games only to lose to Rio de Janeiro. Coupled with the humiliating take down of his ambitious health care plan, his prestige was wobbling and the stars aligned for her.
Her staff in Alaska released her position paper that laid out her positions on every issue. No abortion, no gay marriage, immigrants beware. Her speech to a world wide audience of business leaders in Hong Kong was like soothing syrup to the business community battered by what they had perceived as an impossibly hard left hand turn under Obama. The nation’s seemingly intractable high unemployment rate was a backdrop to everything she said.
The Republicans geared for the mid term elections and looked ahead to 2012 and the polls that had once dismissed her showed a remarkable turn in her favor. She had built her relationships with the media into a love affair, and she hammered home her twin messages of fiscal restraint and family values.
Everyone knew she would stride into the convention in 2012 like a female colossus, preaching her message of fiscal conservatism and the historic role of women as keeper of the purse strings The Republican leadership was already rejoicing. .She would win the nomination on the first ballot, vowing fiscal restraint and world leadership through market leadership.
She would pick up the ball and never drop it, storm the country, dominate the talk shows ride the Internet like no one before her. Not content with saturated media coverage she will take herself into the country, speaking to the City Club in Cleveland, the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago, the Masonic Temple in San Francisco.
Somewhere in her travels she’ll be dubbed America’s Margaret Thatcher and she’ll never shrink from it. The economy, unemployment and family values are her stock in trade. She never wavers. She speaks in her down home style, with tasseled hair, steel rimmed glasses and off the rack pin stripe suit.
She never lets race enter her campaign but it sits there like the proverbial elephant in the room, kept alive by right wing followers and the racial tumor that still exists in the nation’s heartland. She defines Obama’s selection as the Nobel Peace Prize as an absurd gesture that demeaned the prestige of the award and hinted at the politics behind it.
Her popularity soars. “Long live our Margaret” became the nation’s cry. In a brutally close race she defeats Barrack Obama.
Within days of taking office, she begins the dismantling of everything that Obama had accomplished in his single term. The bounty once again begins to flow to the corporations, Wall Street, the wealthy and to a greatly relieved middle class, ready to begin the party again. The disadvantaged flinches but had lost their advocate. She had reinstated the tax breaks for the wealthy that had been laboriously taken apart by Obama; she slashed taxes across the board and lo and behold the economic engine of the world’s most productive machine began to pick up steam.
In the hill country outside Austin, in Silicon Valley and in upstate New York the production of semiconductors was surging, presaging the return of the information technology industry that had driven the economy for decades.
And yet…
There was a deep pocket of national unease at the opportunities that seemed to have slipped away. Obama had based his argument for universal health care on a moral imperative and the nation had slowly and reluctantly come to agree with him. But the health care program passed by congress had only dealt with it on the fringes and there was concern that s great opportunity had been squandered.
And the effects of her distain with Foreign Policy had become, apparent in her almost infantile grasp of foreign affairs and a complete lack of interest in the subject. It surfaced at her first meeting of the world’s industrial leaders who showed no interest in her charms and were appalled at her lack of understanding of their common concerns.
Back home she found herself on a collision course with North Korea and Iran who tested her with their plans to not only continue development of nuclear weapons but clear indications that they planned to put their nuclear secrets on the market.
Forced to react but nearly paralyzed by conflicting advice she reached for some degree of certainty. She gives Israel thumbs up to go after Iran and is gratified by the almost instant blitz on Iran that threatened to send that country back to the stone age, She met with Chinese leaders about N.Korea and while details were never made public China began military action against the North. The Korean peninsula reeled.
Russia, always suspicious of the giant on its border bared its nuclear fangs. Roiled by the rapidly developing deterioration of the world order India and Pakistan readied their nuclear armament. The world was in turmoil.
The U.S, which had served so effectively as the cop on the beat since the Second World War had lost moral leadership since Palin, had showed her distain for world affairs. The world was leaderless.
The nuclear trigger that began the end of civilization came from Pakistan where an aggressive military cabal took control of the nuclear firing room and sent multiple nuclear warheads into India’s population centers. India retaliated and suddenly Russia was making moves to put its vast nuclear arsenal at the ready. U.S. Intelligence sources and Palin’s military advisors convinced her that only a first strike against our old foe would save the country.
The world waited.
