In his column "Please, Mrs. Palin, run for president" LEONARD PITTS JR. asks Palin to run and win the Republican primary for President in 2012. So not to lose to Democrats but rather to put to the American people up front and honestly the great question of the times. Are we really that friggin stupid?
What Mr. Pitts seems to miss in his fine piece is that we already know the answer is a resounding… YOUBETCHA!
Below is his entire column from 2/26/2010
DEAR Sarah Palin: I hear you’re pondering a run for the White House in
2012. Last week, you told Fox News it would be “absurd” to rule it out.
I’m writing to ask that you rule it in. I very badly want you to run for
— and “win” — the Republican nomination for the presidency. I know
you’re waiting for the punch line. Maybe you figure I think you’d be a
weak candidate who would pave the way for President Barack Obama’s easy
reelection. That’s not it. No, I want you to run because I believe a
Palin candidacy would force upon this country a desperately needed
moment of truth. It would require us to finally decide what kind of
America we want to be. Mrs. Palin, you are an avatar of the shameless
hypocrisy and cognitive disconnection that have driven our politics for
the past decade, a process of stupidification creeping like kudzu over
our national life. As Exhibit A, consider your recent speech at a
so-called “tea party” event, wherein you dismissed the president as a
“charismatic guy with a teleprompter.” Bad enough you imply that
teleprompter use is the mark of an insubstantial man, even though you
and every other major politician use them. What made the comment truly
jaw-dropping is that, even as you spoke, you had penned crib notes on
your left palm, clearly visible. Mrs. Palin, if Obama is an idiot for
reading a prepared speech off a teleprompter, what are you for reading
notes you’ve inked on your hand like a schoolkid who failed to study for
the big test?
In the Fox interview, you scored Obama for supposedly expecting
Americans to “sit down and shut up” and accept his policies. But when
asked when the president has ever said that, you couldn’t answer. Obama,
you sputtered, has just been condescending with his “general persona.” I
found that a telling moment. See, ultimately what you represent is not
conservatism. Heck, I suspect that somewhere, Barry Goldwater and Ronald
Reagan are spinning like helicopter rotors at the very idea.
No, you represent the latest iteration of an anti-intellectualism that
periodically rises in the American character. There is, historically and
persistently, a belief in us that y’all just can’t trust nobody who
acts too smart or talks too good — in other words, somebody whose
“general persona” indicates they may have once cracked a book or had a
thought. Americans tend to believe common sense the exclusive province
of humble folks without sheepskins on the wall or big words in their
vocabularies.
I don’t mock those people. They are my parents, my family elders,
members of my childhood church. I honor their native good sense, what
Mom called “mother wit.” But if it is insulting to condescend to them,
it is equally insulting to mythologize them.
More to the point, something is wrong when we celebrate mental
mediocrity like yours under the misapprehension that competence or, God
forbid, “intelligence,” makes a person one of those “elites” — that’s a
curse word now — lacking authenticity, compassion and common sense.
So no, this is not a clash of ideologies but a clash between
intelligence and its opposite. And I am tired of being asked to pretend
stupid is a virtue. That’s why I’d welcome the moment of truth your
campaign would bring. It would force us to decide once and for all
whether we are permanently committed to the path of ignorance, of
birthers, truthers and tea party incoherence you represent, or whether
we will at last turn back from the cliff toward which we race.
If the latter, wonderful, God bless America. If the former, well, some
of us can finally quit hoping the nation will return to its senses and
plan accordingly. Either way, we need to know, and your candidacy would
tell us. If you love this country, you can do it no greater service.
Run, Sarah, run.
Pitts’ e-mail address is [email protected].