How Sarah Palin Could End Up As President

Scary thought but could easily happen.

2012: How Sarah Barracuda Becomes President

Why do you think Barack Obama is being so nice to Michael Bloomberg?
By John Heilemann

On a pale-gold mid-October afternoon, Sarah Palin takes the stage at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, and the faithful are ready for her. The crowd, 1,500 strong, is mostly white, on the older side, and casually dressed—though in my row there’s a hulking young Samoan in full Revolutionary War regalia. For the past hour, the audience has been treated to a series of warm-up acts that aren’t your typical Northern California fare: a choir called Celestial City; the head of the outfit sponsoring the event, the Liberty & Freedom Foundation, who speaks of a conservative “reawakening”; and a local talk-radio host whose shtick is that of a bargain-basement Glenn Beck, replete with attacks on Karl Marx, Richard Nixon (for creating the EPA), Nancy Pelosi, and, of course, “Barack Hussein Obama.”

Palin’s own brand of performance art is no less barbed and no more subtle, but still infinitely fascinating. In a deep-blue jacket and tight black skirt, she uncorks a 40-minute soliloquy that is equal parts populism, moralism, stand-up comedy, and free association, all rendered in a syntax as fractured as Joe Theismann’s tibia after Lawrence Taylor got through with him. She doles out personal, if possibly fictitious, anecdotes that position her, despite the millions she has pocketed in the past two years, as a defiantly downscale girl: that she and Todd drove their motor home from Wasilla to Los Angeles (distance: 3,375 miles) to watch Bristol on Dancing With the Stars. She winks (metaphorically) at her pop-culture image, snapping off a “you betcha” and later declaring, “November 2 is right around the corner—I can see it from my house!” She rails against union bosses who are “thugs” and “elitist billionaires who are funding the leftist agenda,” while gaily mocking Obama, Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, and Jerry Brown: “They act like they’re permanent residents of some unicorn ranch in fantasyland.” She invokes the California of old as a paradise lost and declares that it must be regained: “I want you all to get to yell ‘Eureka’ in this Golden State of opportunity.” And she cites Ronald Reagan in promising the same for the country: “If we do our part, as President Reagan said … the great confident roar of American progress, growth, and optimism will resound again!”

This is a stump speech—or, at least, it sounds that way to many in the crowd. With each stanza, their cheers for Palin escalate from loud to deafening, and by the end, more than a few are shouting out, “Run, Sarah!” and “Madam President!”

Until not long ago, the only people who took seriously the notion that Palin would make a White House bid in 2012, let alone win the Republican nomination, were those who really do live at the unicorn ranch—and spend their time there huffing pixie dust. When Palin quit the Alaska governorship in 2009, her political career seemed over. And even after she resurrected herself, emerging through her media ubiquity and her aggressive endorsement strategy as arguably the most powerful figure in the GOP, much of the political world believed that she was animated by non-presidential motives. To further pad her bank account. To redeem her reputation. To turn herself into the party’s preeminent kingmaker. Or possibly all three.

But today the conventional wisdom about Palin is being revised again, nowhere more so than within the ranks of professional Republicans. Among two dozen senior strategists and operatives with whom I’ve spoken in recent days—including many of those responsible for securing the nomination for the party’s last three standard-bearers—there is a growing consensus that Palin is running or setting herself up to run. All agreed that her entry would radically and fundamentally transform the race. Most averred that if she steps into the fray, she stands a reasonable chance of claiming the Republican prize. Indeed, more than one argued that she is already the de facto front-runner.

For many Republicans, a Palin nomination would be a shrieking nightmare—just as for most Democrats, it would be a wet dream. (Asked about the possibility by reporters, David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, quipped, “Something tells me we won’t get that lucky.”) The emotions here are diametrically opposed but based on a shared conviction: that Palin, whose national approval rating in a CBS News poll this month stood at a lowly 22 percent, is irredeemably unelectable, and thus her nomination would essentially guarantee Obama a second term.

Or would it? In a two-way contest, almost certainly. But what if a Palin nomination provoked a credible independent candidacy? What if the candidacy in question was that of, oh, Michael Rubens Bloomberg? What would happen then?

That’s a lot of ifs, I hear you saying, and you are not wrong. Yet none of these twists is actually all that implausible. In fact, the likelihood of Bloomberg’s running is just as great as, if not greater than, it was when he considered taking the plunge in 2008—and that specter is very much on the minds of Obama’s people. In the past few months, the White House has made a gaudy show of sucking up to the mayor: inviting him to play golf in Martha’s Vineyard with Obama, floating his name as a potential Treasury secretary, dispatching Joe Biden and Tim Geithner to have breakfast with him and seek his economic counsel. The motivations behind the blandishments are many, but not the least is to blunt the Bloomberg threat—to keep him on the sidelines in 2012, where he and his billions would pose no danger of redrawing the electoral map in unpredictable and perilous ways.

The unpredictability and the peril would increase exponentially with Palin in the mix. This scenario might seem bizarre, but we live in bizarre times. At a moment like the present—when American politics is wildly polarized and unstable, populist fervor has gripped the right and left, and the economy continues to flatline—it’s worth contemplating how much weirder things might get in 2012, and whether that weirdness could be so extreme as to make the unthinkable thinkable.

To wit: President Palin, anyone?

On the day Palin was driving the throng into a frenzy in San Jose, Mitt Romney was in Bedminster, New Jersey, appearing at a sedate fund-raising lunch for Representative Leonard Lance. This is how Romney has spent much of 2010: tirelessly tilling the Republican fields, collecting chits and dispensing dollars from coast to coast. As of September 30, according to Politico, the former Massachusetts governor’s PAC had donated nearly $1 million to 188 candidates for the House, two dozen for the Senate, and twenty for governorships. By Election Day, his frantic schedule will have carried him to 30 states.

In a normal presidential cycle, Romney would be the clear Republican front-runner. His operation is top-notch. His PAC raked in $5.1 million in the first three quarters of the year, more than any other prospective candidate. And since he finished as runner-up to John McCain in 2008, it is, as they say, his turn—a quality that usually matters hugely in a party that has long operated in accord with the principle of primogeniture. Yet, for all of his dogged efforts, Romney has failed to solidify his status as the man to beat. A recent NBC News–Wall Street Journal poll found that his favorability among conservative voters is just 30 percent.

The reasons are myriad, but paramount among them is his role in enacting a health-care law in Massachusetts that bears a striking similarity to the controversial (and loathed on the right) federal overhaul that Democrats passed this year. Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole’s campaign in 1996, argues that Obamacare in 2012 will be “what Iraq was to the Democrats last time, the defining issue and a fault line in the party”—one that may well prove as harmful to Romney as Hillary Clinton’s vote authorizing the war was to her in 2008. Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, likens Romney’s history on health care to “a boat anchor attached to his leg,” which he needs to get rid of “or [his candidacy] doesn’t work.” Can he do it? “Yeah, just explain it was the crystal meth,” Norquist cracks.

Health care may be the most acute of Romney’s ailments, but it is symptomatic of a deeper malady: his uneasy fit with a party base where all of the energy is flowing toward insurgency. “Candidates like Romney have been getting killed all around the country,” says the consultant Alex Castellanos, who advised the governor in 2008. “It’s Romney who’s lost seven or eight Republican primaries—Establishment candidates who’ve been overthrown.”

Castellanos is talking about the effect of the tea party, which is all but certain to be anything but diminished by the midterm results on November 2. “That group of folks is gonna be more passionate, more energized, and more engaged,” argues Matthew Dowd, George W. Bush’s chief strategist in 2004. Their ire, too, may be exacerbated in the event that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell fail to sate their anti-government yearnings with dramatic cuts in spending and taxes and a repeal of Obamacare—a likely outcome given Boehner and McConnell’s insider proclivities and the president’s veto pen.

Romney will not be the only candidate given fits by the rise of the tea party. Today, there are four other potential establishmentarian candidates giving serious thought to running: Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, and South Dakota senator John Thune. And all have résumés, temperaments, and/or policy positions unlikely to sit well with the tea-partyers: Barbour is a former Republican National Committee chairman and big-time corporate lobbyist; Daniels was Bush’s budget director and a longtime Beltway player; Pawlenty is an erstwhile liberal on climate change; and Thune is, well, a senator, and a milquetoasty one at that.

“All those guys, they could try and turn it up and have the fervor, but voters are gonna read through it,” says Dowd. “It’s just not authentic to them, because they’ve been part of the Washington scene or taking part in state politics, where they cut deals and made compromises—which is part of governing but lethal in this environment.”

On this reading, the tea party and its populist brethren seem likely to emerge as the new Christian right, only more powerful—not merely exercising an effective veto over any nominee but altering the underlying dynamics of the race. “There will be two simultaneous primaries: a mainstream-conservative primary and a primary in the anti-Establishment wing of the party,” says John Weaver, McCain’s guru in 2000 and the early part of his run in 2008. “And then there’ll be a playoff down the road between the winners of the two.”

The most prominent potential contestants in the tea-party bracket are the Fox News candidates, literally (all are on Rupert Murdoch’s payroll) and figuratively: Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Palin. Among insiders, Huckabee is widely written off because he lacks the capacity to raise big cash and his appeal is limited to Evangelicals, whose influence is fading in the party; many insiders expect him not to run.

The opposite is true of Gingrich. Unlike in 2008, when public speculation about his diving in was matched by private reluctance on his part, this time the former Speaker of the House appears intent on running. But while Gingrich has garnered plenty of headlines with his rhetorical napalm blasts—comparing backers of the ground-zero mosque to Nazis, saying that Obama has a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview, asserting that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius behaves in “the spirit of the Soviet tyranny”—his inability to moderate or modulate himself causes Republican pros to discount his viability. “We Republicans are so desperate for an ideas guy like Newt Gingrich that sometimes we even turn to Newt Gingrich,” says Castellanos. “[But] he is not a serious candidate for president.”

Another conceivable tea-party suitor is Texas governor Rick Perry, who appears on the verge of winning his third full term in office. Running in a primary against Kay Bailey Hutchison, the state’s senior U.S. senator, Perry became a darling of the Washington-haters when he suggested that Texas might secede from the union. Having balanced his state’s budget every year by keeping a lid on spending, he is beloved by fiscal hawks; packing a .380 Ruger (which he used to plug a coyote recently when it threatened his dog while they were jogging—the coyote “became mulch,” he said), he’s a hero to Second Amendment zealots and ****-kickers alike.

But Perry hasn’t given the slightest public indication that he’s interested in running, and even if he did get in, he might well prove no match for Palin in the anti-Establishment tier. “She has a greater claim to outsider status than anybody else in the race or who might get into the race,” says Vin Weber, a former Minnesota congressman who backed Romney in 2008 and will be with Pawlenty this time around. “Whether it’s tea-party activists, Evangelicals, or whatever stripe of activist you’re talking about, she has the strongest grassroots base, the most credibility, and the greatest appeal of anybody in the party.”

Weber pauses. “If she runs, she’s a very serious factor,” he says. “Everyone’s strategy is going to have to change—everyone’s. It’s a big computation to make.”

After Palin finished her quasi-prepared remarks in San Jose, she planted herself in a chair positioned a few feet stage left and proceeded to engage in ten minutes of Q&A with the honcho from the Liberty & Freedom Foundation. The Qs were big fat floating softballs (“Isn’t there a better way to lower that $1.4 trillion deficit than just using tax increases?”), but one hinted obliquely at the matter on everybody’s mind: “There are going to be a lot of people running [for president] in 2012 … With such a crowded field coming up, do you think that’s gonna help or hurt the eventual candidates?”

“Competition breeds success and makes everybody work harder,” Palin said. “So I want to see a very aggressive contested primary where everybody has to engage … Now, contested primaries, even through this last election cycle, it’s been very interesting, it’s been fun to be able to engage in them. I’ve endorsed candidates who maybe were second or third or fourth in line down in the polls, maybe underfunded, outgunned, you know, heretofore unknown, and to endorse them, it’s always a double-edged sword, because, you know, if I put my name in close to their campaign, then they’re under extra scrutiny and they get clobbered in the press—and I feel horrible for them! So, more power to those bold ones who accept my endorsement!”

For those who believe Palin plans to run in 2012, the fact that she has thrown herself into so many races—to date, she has endorsed 56 candidates, 35 of them tea-partyers—is a significant piece of evidence. There are others. The fund-raising total for her PAC through September 30 ($2.5 million) ranks behind only Romney among potential candidates. She has given more than 70 speeches this year all across the country. In September, she dipped her toe in the Iowa waters by headlining the state party’s annual Ronald Reagan Dinner.

Much was made of the fact that Palin did none of the traditional kowtowing to Republican activists and local officials in the Hawkeye State. Yet, in other places, she has begun courting GOP lever-pullers whose support is critical to winning the nomination. Earlier this month, Palin attended a closed-door dinner at the Breakers in Palm Beach, hosted by the CEO of the conservative media company Newsmax and attended by several dozen A-list insiders, and repeatedly invoked the memory of Reagan. In doing so, she not only tried implicitly to rebut concerns about her electability—noting that naysayers said the same about the Gipper in 1980—but imbue herself with an optimism that some Republicans have found lacking in her relentless assaults on Obama. (In San Jose, she name-checked Reagan eleven times, often in proximity to terms such as “positive” or “exceptionalism.”)