President Palin would be good for Canada – Charles W. Moore – Telegraph-Journal

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Whether or not former Alaska governor and 2008 vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin can mount a successful campaign for the Republican Party presidential nomination in 2012, let alone go on to defeat an incumbent Barack Obama in a general election, there’s no denying she’s become a force to be reckoned with – not just in U.S., but in North American politics.

This was underscored by Ms. Palin’s visit to Calgary recently, her first public appearance outside the United States since stepping down as governor of Alaska to speak at Calgary’s BMO Centre as part of the Fraser Institute’s influential speakers program. Ms. Palin addressed an enthusiastic audience of 1,200 who paid $160 to $220 a head for the opportunity to hear her deliver her message advocating smaller government and fiscal restraint.

Ms. Palin, currently a Fox News commentator, whose memoir, Going Rogue, is a bestseller, actually has a strong pro-Canadian record, although she’s granted little credit for it in Obama-besotted Canuck public perception.

As governor of the border state of Alaska, after signing an agreement granting TransCanada pipeline US$500 million to help launch a new 2,700-kilometre pipeline project to carry natural gas from Alaska to Alberta, Ms. Palin affirmed her desire to “grow the relationship we have with Canada,” observing that the NAFTA has enhanced job-creation and growth in both countries.

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Some maintain that Sarah Palin is a 21st-Century version of Ronald Reagan, another unpolished speaker and thinker with a clear idea of what America is about. In mid-1977, the notion that Mr. Reagan could win the presidency by a landslide in 1980 would have been ridiculed, and yet…. It also should not be discounted that Christian evangelicals make up a vast voter demographic (one in four U.S. adults self-identifies as evangelical Protestant; add conservative Catholics and you’re closer to 35 per cent), and Ms. Palin, a baptized Catholic who now attends a Pentecostal church, strongly identifies with traditional Christian beliefs and values, notwithstanding that many Tory and Republican neoconservative secularists are nearly as clueless as liberals about what motivates and energizes religious conservatives.

Ronald Reagan (or in a Democratic context if you wish, Harry Truman) amply demonstrated that one doesn’t have to be a “public intellectual” to be an effective and successful president.

Nobody should be counting Sarah Palin out yet, and a Palin presidency would likely be good for Canada, regardless of what many Canadians think they think about her.

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