Sarah Palin, I'm pumped and in your corner, but you need help

If Sarah Palin is to again take America by storm, she really needs a better speech writer.

I say that because yesterday morning MSNBC aired her speech in support of Saxby Chambliss in his runoff race against Democratic challenger Jim Martin, and I'm sorry to report that I didn't quite catch her drift, assuming she had one.

Now mind you, what Palin had to say was scripted, naturally, but her prepared text was more of an indecipherable ramble than anything approaching a tidy oration. Most speeches have a beginning, a middle, and an end, yet this one's end was strikingly similar to its beginning, while the middle was indistinguishable from either, making the whole thing but an immense scoop of verbal mashed potatoes.

Chambliss, I gathered, is needed back in Washington to do something or other for the good people of Georgia. That much I got. Just what it was he is needed for, however, I never did quite figure out. There was something about government -- yes, I definitely got the notion that the Republican senator from Georgia has something to do with government, as well as the unborn and, even more bizarrely (and suspiciously), Sarah Palin's son in Iraq.

Oh, and she's running for the White House.

Beyond that? I was stumped.

I mention all this because just as Palin was touring the Peach State, spreading bafflement on behalf of Chambliss, the Politico was reporting on her rather dubious future as a "GOP star." And if she's ever going to overcome the "dubious" part, she's going to need a coherent stump speech.

Her base may not care; in fact, the enraptured might not recognize coherency if they heard it. But of course for Sarah Palin her base isn't the problem, and likewise her problem isn't the base. It is, rather, the "political center," which, as the Politico so astutely reported, "may threaten her presidential ambitions" even as her "flash emergence on the national stage has left her as well positioned as any Republican to make a serious run for the GOP nomination in 2012."

The Politico wasn't joking. Gov. Palin really is "well positioned," at least for the moment, and at least as far as Gallup is concerned. For the latter recently found that "Palin is atop a field of ten Republicans in a hypothetical 2012 matchup, including 2008 primary candidates Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee."

Aside from dubious, precarious best describes that "atop" part. Because even though white evangelical conservatives more or less rule the primary roost in the launch state of Iowa, moderates begin to play a larger role from there on out (just ask Huckabee). That could spell trouble for Palin, something no thinking man or woman wants to see: "Among moderate and liberal Republicans, Palin dropped about 20 points, falling behind Romney as the group's preferred 2012 nominee."

Yikes. I want Palin to have every possible advantage in the nomination process, because the ultimate threat is Romney, not Palin; because Romney is articulate, not Palin; and because Romney, not Palin, can pass himself off as economically knowledgeable without the national audience tittering.

To explain further, yesterday Paul Krugman wrote a customarily cogent piece explaining that "deficit worriers have it all wrong" (which my best friend, another Post-Keynesian of considerable professional note, has also been trying to get through my thick head for weeks). His argument, as one might expect from an economist, was from an economic point of view: "public debt isn’t as bad a thing as many people believe -- it’s basically money we owe to ourselves." Hence government, said Krugman, should spend, spend, spend its way out of this recessionary cataclysm.

Economically speaking, that's great -- or at least it holds the potential of being great. But from a political point of view, which is my pathological concern, it could spell disaster. Because if the Obama administration spends its way through this crisis, and even digs us out of this crisis through spending, I can guarandamntee you that Republicans in 2012 will be screaming that we would have come out of it just fine without the spending -- yet now, our even bigger headaches are deficits and the national debt and inevitably higher taxes, all conjured from typical Democratic behavior, just as those prudently frugal Republicans warned voters back in 2009.

And I can just as safely guarandamntee you that we need Sarah Palin as the GOP nominee trying to make that argument in 2012, not the more articulate Mitt Romney (or Bobby Jindal, or Mark Sanford, or …).

But to get there, Ms. Palin is simply going to have to start making some sense, just to pick off a moderate here and there and thereupon squeeze past the qualified candidates in the primaries. The final thing I can guarandamntee you, however, is that she won't make it if she continues giving speeches like the utterly incoherent one she gave yesterday.