Governor Palin 4 President

Before Sarah Palin became John McCain's running mate last year, we spent a morning in her Alaska office while she was still governor. We sat down for a one-hour TV interview, and I was most impressed with her insights, traditional values, grasp of issues, and just what a sincere and genuinely warm person she was.

The morning in her office made it clear why so many Americans across the board respond to and connect deeply with her brand of politics. However, the former governor has become an icon to many and a disaster waiting to happen for others.

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America loves second acts. Exhibit A: the book tour phenomenon. Every washed-up, has-been former star can jump-start his or her career by writing a book and singing a redemptive tune in book stops across the country. In many respects, the book tour is a microcosm of the democratic political process. The form relies on the ability of the writer to hold the audience's interest by simply recounting his or her own story. The most successful ones are able to resonate with the blue-collar public by suggesting a better alternative to their own lives.

I don't begrudge Mrs. Palin and the whirlwind media tour for the release of her book, "Going Rogue." It's a good read. It's more than 400 pages of talking points distilled into homespun metaphors. Does that constitute a good vision? I'm not so sure. And therein lies the problem with Mrs. Palin's much-expected run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

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These next few months must become Mrs. Palin's own personal primary - a time when she does some serious policy introspection and fleshes out in her mind what issues will define her presidential run. It's not enough to list them on a pocket card to recite at local pig roasts. She can only get so far with friendly locals more star-struck than hungry for solutions. Mrs. Palin must add intellectual heft behind her populist stands - drill down what sets her apart and then test it with the populace.

The challenge is not to contrast against her potential primary opponents - they've yet to really surface, let alone matter. No, Mrs. Palin's larger quest must come opposite the Great One himself, President Obama. It's a target-rich environment, for sure. Mr. Obama has given every Republican plenty to dismantle and deride. 

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Followers don't expect her to recite Ayn Rand or William Blackstone in her speeches. They may not even care at this point. Yet they soon will, and Mrs. Palin must anticipate that rising hunger for substance all voters eventually come to expect and demand from presidential hopefuls. There will come a time when homespun homilies will not carry the day.

There's a major disconnect that started long before Mrs. Palin's book tour and traces its history back to her campaign days as a vice presidential contender. That disconnect, simply stated, is: Good policy makes good politics. All throughout her book tour, and continuing today, Mrs. Palin has served herself well on the rhetoric and yet has offered nothing by way of substance.

At some point, political leaders must stop preying on the fears of the citizenry and start offering workable solutions.

The author is correct: Governor Palin must target the disaster Obama.  But what Mr. Williams overlooks are the dozen assaults Governor Palin has already hit Obama with, like Death Panels and health care, his Socialist agenda, climategate and so on.  I would say only Rush Limbaugh and Governor Palin have been speaking the truth and going after Obama & his socialist crew for all their lies and disastrous policies!!

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Palin's Paradox

The hacked e-mails have been mined for words and phrases that can be distorted to misrepresent what the scientists were discussing. In a Dec. 9 op-ed, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin argued that "The e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' . . . manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures." Yet the e-mail she cites was written in 1999, just after the warmest year ever recorded (1998) to that date. It could not possibly have referred to the claim that global temperatures have declined over this decade -- a claim that is false (the current decade, as has been recently reported, will go down as the warmest on record).

In one case, professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia refers to a "trick" regarding temperature data that he attributes to an article that co-authors and I published in the journal Nature in 1998. We showed one up-to-date temperature data set from thermometer measurements along with a longer data set, based on calculations from natural "proxy" records such as ice cores, corals and tree rings, that ended in 1980. The "trick" (by which scientists generally mean a clever solution, i.e., a "trick of the trade") was that the longer-term record could be viewed in the context of recent temperature measurements.

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In the same e-mail, Jones uses the phrase "hide the decline" in reference to work by tree-ring expert Keith Briffa. Because tree-ring information has been found to correlate well with temperature readings, it is used to plot temperatures going back hundreds of years or more. Briffa described a phenomenon in which the density of wood exhibits an enigmatic decline in response to temperature after about 1960. This decline was the focus of Briffa's original article, and Briffa was clear that these data should not be used to represent temperatures after 1960. By saying "hide the decline," Jones meant that a diagram he was producing was not to show those data during the unreliable post-1960 period.

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The conspiracy theories about the e-mails are fueled in part by their criticisms of the quality of two papers regarding global warming and a suggestion that at least one of the papers be kept out of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. As Nature noted in a recent editorial, neither the e-mail writers nor the IPCC suppressed any findings. Both papers were included in the IPCC's report. Some statements in the stolen e-mails reflect poor judgment -- for example, a colleague referring to deleting e-mails that might be subject to a Freedom of Information Act request -- but there is no evidence that this happened.

Palin wrote that Alaska's climate is changing but referred to "thawing permafrost and retreating sea ice" as "natural, cyclical environmental trends." In fact, such changes are among the effects scientists predicted would occur as greenhouse gas levels increase. Scientific evidence for the reality of human-caused climate change includes independently replicated data documenting the extent of warming; unprecedented melting of glaciers; rises in global sea levels; increasingly widespread continental drought; and models that predict all of these things but only when human impacts are included. Those same models project far more profound and potentially damaging impacts of climate change if we do not take action to stabilize greenhouse gas levels.

The scientific consensus regarding human-caused climate change is based on decades of work by thousands of scientists around the world. The National Academy of Sciences has concluded that the scientific case is clear. As world leaders work in Copenhagen to try to combat this problem, some critics are seeking to cloud the debate and confuse the public.

What I find quite comical is the “THEROY” of man-made climate change is based on real and genuine research, for the most part, but the model in which it is based on has been manipulated by man negating all of it.   Ah!!

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Letter To The Editor: I’d like to thank Eugene Robinson for highlighting Alaska’s achievements on climate change [“Palin’s own ‘Climate- gate,’” op-ed, Dec. 15] and for noting that I’ve “treated the issue as serious, complex, and worthy of urgent attention,” while making “any number of pragmatic, reasonable, smart decisions as governor.” But he’s wrong to suggest that my views have somehow changed or that now I’ll have to “renounce” my past efforts.

Once again: I don’t deny that climate change is real. In creating a sub-cabinet to deal specifically with the issue, I said that “Alaska’s climate change strategy must be built on sound science and the best available facts and must recognize Alaska’s interest in economic growth and the development of its resources.” That goal made sense to me then, and it makes sense to me now. 

Mr. Robinson tries to make hay out of the fact that I asked the group to advise me regarding opportunities to participate in “carbon-trading markets.” But considering voluntary participation in carbon-trading programs is much different from endorsing the economically disastrous cap-and-tax proposals put forward by Democrats in Washington. Those proposals will burden our job creators and raise energy prices for all of us, and that’s why I oppose them. 

As governor of Alaska, I sought common-sense solutions that took real-world costs and benefits into account. That’s what I’m looking for now. But that’s not what’s on the table in Washington or in Copenhagen. 

Sarah Palin, Wasilla, Alaska