Why do people support palin

The appearance was met with a shrug and, according to script, a handful of snarky reporter tweets about her wardrobe. Right now, for Trump, that kind of political trajectory—from the center of the known universe to a lesser moon orbiting Pluto—feels like an impossibility.

Unlike Palin, Trump was an actual president who changed the course of history, with a vise grip on the Republican Party and most of its voters. Trump has only just left office; he has yet to give an interview; his second impeachment trial is underway; and his influence on the GOP seems secure enough. The media will cover him for a long time to come, and hangers-on like Matt Gaetz will always be available for content. He will tease a presidential run, and maybe box out other Republican contenders in the process.

But the center of gravity in politics always changes, whether he decides to run or not. What is Trump without his tweets? It was proof, yet again, that the political class is permanently addicted to the present, rarely looking up from Twitter to think about future possibilities that might contradict it.

With his social media megaphone gone, Trump is quite obviously a diminished man, operating in a media environment that looks a little more like , when the establishment media had a bit more power, and a little less like Yes, there are more conservative outlets today, and more discreet communities where the cult of Trumpism can flourish.

Without social media, his influence moving forward will now be much more dependent on the media and the Republican Party, and how much they choose to accommodate him. Right now they are. Better politicians, as always, will find ways to win by wresting power away from those who hold it, marshaling voters with messages of their own. Without the presidency, he already commands much less of our mindshare than he did only a few weeks ago. Like Palin, Trump himself will recede over time, even if the damage he has inflicted on our political culture remains.

The media has started to search for the next ambassador from Crazytown, the next ratings grab. In just the last two weeks, as cable-news ratings started to tumble without the constant drip of Trump outrage, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon Karen, became the new hotness.

The writers, as the Twitter joke goes, have embarked on a new season, with some wild new plot twists and characters. And then it stopped. Trump will certainly be relevant and a player in the next cycle, but that will decrease over time, and without Twitter and the trappings of power, I think people will get tired of him.

Then John McCain lost. She peaced-out on being governor. The internet Sarah-ploded. When I read the news story recently about Track Palin assaulting his girlfriend and threatening to kill himself, I remembered this sweet interview with Palin years ago in a running magazine.

It was about Track as a teen, planting water bottles for his mother on her training route. Could she have known how hard this would be on her children?

Anybody who lives here has occasional bouts of a far-north inferiority complex. You imagine a larger stage. Palin probably felt that way, and then she got her stage. She made money. She got famous. But does she seem happy to you? The world has been mean. Beneath the toxicity, I detect brittleness. I wonder if she thinks about what she left behind in Alaska. I wonder if she misses it. Nobody wants to talk about Palin. There is speculation from time to time about her running for state office, but chances seem remote.

On occasion someone I know sees her in a yoga class or in the stands at a hockey game. Once, a friend encountered her really early in the morning, with no makeup, in Wasilla Walmart. In the end, the legislature rejected the gas-line deal. But, in a twist, it agreed to the oil tax—which had been intended as an inducement to pass the rest of the package. Palin came out hard on the other side of the philosophical divide from Murkowski—and made it personal.

She announced she would challenge him for governor. And she declared her intention to hire Tom Irwin to negotiate the deal.

She knows how to pick her way down the political route that she feels will be the most beneficial to what she wants to do. Just after he signed the new Petroleum Profits Tax, the FBI raided the offices of six legislators, in what became the biggest corruption scandal in state history. During the legislative session, the FBI had hidden a video camera at the Baranof Hotel, in Juneau, in a suite that belonged to Bill Allen, a major power broker and the chief executive of Veco Corporation, an oil-services firm.

Several were later sent to prison. In the Republican primary, Palin crushed Murkowski, delivering one of the worst defeats ever suffered by an incumbent governor anywhere. She went on to have little trouble dispatching Knowles, an oil-friendly Democrat. Maybe some others. But the five-letter word that people in Alaska associated with her name was clean. P alin has gained a reputation for being erratic, undisciplined, not up to the job.

She began by confronting the two biggest issues in Alaska—the gas pipeline and the oil tax—and drove the policy process on both of them. After taking office in December , she kept her word and hired Tom Irwin, and other members of the Magnificent Seven. They devised a plan to attract someone other than the oil companies to build the pipeline, and they bid out the license to move ahead with it—to the deep displeasure of the oil producers, who vowed not to participate.

Palin came under serious political pressure. That spring, the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act sailed to passage, helped along by criminal indictments in the Veco scandal, which were handed down just as the bill came up. Still, Palin was the deciding factor. A new pipeline plan had seemed unlikely when she took over, but she kept the legislature focused on the task. She kept herself focused, too: though priding herself on her well-advertised social conservatism, she was prepared to set it aside when necessary.

Rather than pick big fights about social issues, she declined to take up two abortion-restriction measures that she favored, and vetoed a bill banning benefits for same-sex partners of state workers.

Next came the oil tax. An explicit charge that the Petroleum Profits Tax was corrupt would imply, by extension, that the unindicted legislators who had passed it were corrupt, too—and she needed their votes. Again Palin kept her worst impulses in check. And when she was drawn into the fight, she proved nimble and resourceful. Two things finally prompted her to move ahead: when tax season rolled around, the PPT yielded much less revenue than anticipated; and Democrats needled her incessantly about how much of a reformer she truly was.

Then as now twitchingly alert to any slight, Palin loathed the implication. Democrats, eager to capitalize on public anger, introduced several tougher alternatives that were particularly aggressive—that is, confiscatory—when oil prices rose. Palin focused on capturing more revenue when prices were low. At first, her team tried to win the Republicans over. So Palin did something that would be hard to imagine from her today: she pivoted to the Democrats.

What she signed into law went well beyond her original proposal: ACES imposes a higher base tax rate than its predecessor on oil profits. But the really significant part has been that the tax rate rises much sooner and more steeply as oil prices climb—the part Democrats pushed for. The tax is assessed monthly, rather than annually, to better capture price spikes, of which there have been many.

ACES also makes it harder for companies to claim tax credits for cleaning up spills caused by their own negligence, as some had done under the old regime. Plunging natural-gas prices have made the project uneconomical.

Her oil tax is a different story: though designed to capture more revenue under most scenarios, ACES has raised a lot more money than almost anyone imagined. But it also shows that the law is working.

Flush with cash, Alaska produced large capital budgets that blunted the effects of the recession. But given the corruption that plagued the PPT, a better benchmark might be the tax it supplanted—the one put on the books after the Exxon Valdez spill.

W hat happened to Sarah Palin? How did someone who so effectively dealt with the two great issues vexing Alaska fall from grace so quickly? In Alaska, she applied those qualities to fulfilling the promises that got her elected, and in her first year was the most popular governor in the country.

She was serious business. But even before she left the state, she let herself be distracted by the many grievances she harbored against a wide range of enemies. When I was in Juneau, a draft memoir by one of her former aides, Frank Bailey, was leaked to a number of political insiders, and from one of them to me.

Bailey was cast aside after years of loyal service and has an ax to grind. But his portrait is persuasive nonetheless, because he peppers his book with internal e-mails that he kept, from Palin and her staff. Ugly rumors of the sort common in politics were another fixation, as this e-mail furnished by Bailey attests:. Palin obsessed over her image, even more than most politicians. According to Bailey, she orchestrated a campaign to inundate newspapers with phony letters praising her. This evidently became a favored tactic.

Bailey even includes a letter he says she wrote under another name accusing an opponent, John Binkley, of copying her Web-site design.