Sarah Palin’s Second Chance

It’s nice to see that Governor Sarah Palin is going to run for Congress. The Alert Alaskan says she will stand for the seat held for half a century by Don Young, who died last month. It may be too soon to endorse any candidate. We don’t, after all, yet know who is running. Yet Mrs. Palin has struck us from the get-go as a substantive woman, who did not deserve the mockery she received from the sexist Democratic scribes. We understand that ours is a minority position in the press. Nu? Mrs. Palin, though, has a knack for standing apart from the crowd. This struck us when she first stepped onto the national stage at Dayton, where she introduced her husband as a union man and a proud member of the United Steelworkers. It was the first time we’d seen a Republican nominee commence a campaign by reaching out so pointedly to Big Labor.Mrs. Palin’s message was that it was the Republicans who had on offer the true program of jobs and growth. Years later, when she confronted the president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, on this head, we wrote about it in an editorial called “Woman of the Year.” We hadn’t seen a conservative politician put the case to labor as well as Mrs. Palin did since Margaret Thatcher had her famous meeting with Solidarity at Gdansk, Poland.We also wrote about Mrs. Palin admiringly in November 2010, when she started criticizing Chairman Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve in respect of quantitative easing. One of the things for the GOP to think about, we said in an editorial at the time, was how it could be “that the only major Republican figure, aside from Congressman Ron Paul, to stand up and be counted on the dollar is Sarah Palin.”What was so remarkable about the moment was the contrast with President Obama, who went to South Korea to offer his global economic vision at the G-20 summit and came back to a headline in the New York Times that said, “Obama’s Economic View Is Rejected on the World Stage.” We also proposed that Mrs. Palin would be a better choice than Hillary Clinton for president of the World Bank.We recount all this because there are so many who seek to mock Mrs. Palin as a wacky figure and who suggest that she has too many children or doesn’t understand world affairs or economic principles. We’re a believer in second chances, and we like the way another brilliant Republican ex-governor, Nikki Haley, just put it, when she said of Mrs. Palin: “We need her voice in Congress!”

Sarah Palin’s Second Chance

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