Has the last of Sarah Palin's 15 minutes finally come and gone?

By Richard K. Barry

I'm not inclined to feel bad about dumb things Republicans do, but I almost pity the Romney-Ryan campaign for the fact that Sarah Palin just won't go away. There she is on Greta Van Susteren's webpage writing that everything she said in 2008 about Barack Obama as an "unqualified and inexperience community organize" is coming true.

My god, won't she ever shut up?

She ads that "this year is a good opportunity for other voices to speak at the convention and I’m excited to hear them." Well, that may be true but only because the Romney campaign doesn't want Palin anywhere near the convention because she's toxic with such a massive majority of voters. 

It's not my problem, but I almost pity Romney that he has to tread so lightly around the moronic ramblings of people like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. I know these people have their fans, but if that includes anyone with a shred of intelligence, I'd be very surprised. 

Great, Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan as his running mate, so this is supposed to mean the election has miraculously turned into a "serious" discussion about the direction of the country. Like a lot of people I think the Ryan pick will in fact smoke Romney out on his hitherto unarticulated plans for America and that this will be a good thing for Democrats. Be that as it may, if the election is about clearer visions for the country, I'm all for the "game change."

Paul Ryan is a far-right ideologue who is also a policy wonk. He's certainly coming from the same place as Palin and the other crazies, but while they spout rhetoric that doesn't really mean anything and doesn't really go anywhere, Ryan proposes things that will actually have an impact on people's lives. The campaign is no longer just about freedom and smaller government and "The Constitution" (whatever that means), it's about hard, identifiable choices with winners and losers.

You may recall that in the 2010 midterm elections, the hard-right refused to offer specific examples of what they would cut to address the deficit. They understood that such talk was politically dangerous. It was better to speak in cliches in order to keep people's minds off the fact that Republican economics would adversely effect so many Americans and benefit a minority.

I guess the point is that now that Romney has made his VP pick, people like Sarah Palin seem more superfluous than ever. It seems the Republicans know they now have to move beyond the rhetoric, put up or shut up, as it were. Sarah Palin is a dinosaur in the context of that discussion.

I don't imagine that Romney will aggressively cut her loose. I'm not expecting anything so dramatic as a renunciation of Tea Party politics, though I doubt Mitt was ever that happy with it. Still, there is something about the Ryan pick that signals a "getting down to cases" that is the polar opposite of whatever it is that Sarah Palin represents.

We should welcome the debate.

She was always an embarrassment. Now she is that and much worse, if that is possible.

(p.s.: For anyone who thinks that Romney can pick Ryan while distancing himself from the Ryan budget, that's not going to happen. How do you pick a guy who is known for one thing and then say that that one thing is not a part of the deal? You don't.)

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)