Sarah Palin Needs to 'man up' in order to run

The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart has read Robert Draper's article from The New York Times Magazine and offers three reasons why Palin won't run:

After reading Robert Draper's profile of Sarah Palin that will run in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday -- the one in which she says "I am" thinking about running for president -- I remain convinced that she won't for three reasons.

First, the half-term governor is a whiner. ...

Second, to be blunt, if Palin is running for the nomination, she is half-assing it right now. ...

The third, and most important, reason why I think Palin won't run for president is because she is spectacular at being a star. ...

Capehart backs-up his reasoning very neatly, even devastatingly. See whether you don't agree by reading his post, Sarah Palin needs to 'man up' if she's going to run. Right now -- and probably up until the point of no return -- Palin is going to be "thinking" about running, because she is able to garner attention by being coy about her intentions.

The Palin Network

The New York Times Magazine has published a lengthy article about Sarah Palin. The Washington Post's Rachel Weiner noticed that the Times' article contained an "interesting anecdote" about Palin's resignation:

One afternoon in June 2009, Gov. Sarah Palin was sitting in the Washington office of her friend Fred Malek, whom she met through McCain during the 2008 campaign. She was listening to the former White House aide to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford map out logical next steps to her political career. Focus on amassing a good record as governor, he advised her. Run for a second term. Develop some policy expertise. Do some extensive overseas travel. Generate some good will by campaigning for fellow Republicans.

Malek told me that he could tell that this wasn't what Palin wanted to hear. Here's the problem, she replied impatiently: I've got a long commute from my house to my office. I don't have the funds to pay for my family to travel with me, and the state won't pay for it, either. I can't afford to have security at my home -- anybody can come up to my door, and they do. Under the laws of Alaska, anybody can file suit or an ethics charge against me, and I have to defend it on my own. I'm going into debt.

Weiner then cited an Anchorage Daily News article in which Palin complained about the debt that, she said, she incurred as a consequence of the ethics complaints against her.

But The Mudflats has some informative posts, on matters of ethics and expenses, which cut through Palin's feeble spin. On the idea that she resigned due to expenses associated with ethics complaints, see "Palin's Millions of Dollars," and "Palin's Millions - Take 2. A Closer Look." Those two articles, written in July of 2009, shortly after Palin quit her job, let the air out of the baloon that Palin tried to float about why she resigned. If she runs, her resignation will be a major issue, and she will try to claim, again, that she quit because the ethics complaints were costing the state of Alaska millions of dollars. They weren't. Sarah Palin quit because celebrity was more exciting (and more remunerative) than the hard work of trying to govern a state.

The complete NY Times article can be read by clicking the post's title. The Times' article is about much more than the ethics complaints' "expenses." For example, there is an amusing anecdote about how Sarah "Just Ask My Mom" Palin became testy when the article's author asked her about the books she had been reading. The article's author spoke with Palin for an hour, by telephone.