5 Lessons Governor Sarah Palin learned from Hillary Clinton's failed 2008 presidential campaign

In case you haven’t noticed, Governor Sarah Palin is running for president in 2012 — though she has not officially announced it yet.

The reason she’s engaged in a stealth campaign for the Republican nomination is because she clearly learned from the mistakes of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential bid.

Here are the top 5 lessons Governor Palin pulled from Hillary’s defeat and how she will prevent the media, the Left, and the Cocktail Party GOP establishment from doing to her what they did to Clinton three years ago.

1. Wait as long as possible to enter the race so that she is not attacked as a front-runner out of the gate.

Hillary Clinton announced her presidential bid, officially, in February of 2007…but everyone knew she was running much earlier than that. She held a big fundraiser for HillPAC in October of 2006, to coincide with her birthday, which was the unofficial kickoff of her campaign. The media thus had an enormous amount of time to strategize how it was going to attack, malign, berate, and brutalize her through the primaries…to hand the nomination, and presidency, to Obama instead.

Since the day after John Kerry’s defeat in 2004, the DNC establishment elite pushed for Obama to be the 2008 Democrat nominee, in much the same way the Cocktail Party GOP establishment has been stressing Mittens “Mood Ring” Romney for the 2012 Republican nomination (since, honestly, the day after John McCain’s loss). Obama was the Left’s darling and the chance for Democrats to claim they “made history” by electing “the historic and unprecedented first black president”, regardless of how incompetent this particular history-maker would prove to be. Romney’s just the latest in a long string of lackluster, Cocktail Party-approved, “it’s his turn!” Republicans who are nominated without any consideration for whether they can actually win that year or not (see also, Bob Dole in 1996 and John McCain in 2008).

Where Democrats like making splashes with fresh, new, history-makers, the Cocktail Party GOP establishment has a sad history of rewarding whoever has been standing around waiting for better men to leave the stage so he can “have his turn”.

And, folks, it’s always a “he”.

Both the DNC elite and the Cocktail Party GOP establishment hate women. In their oak-paneled, private clubs, both groups work overtime to ensure female politicians “know their place” and are discouraged from ever seeking the highest office in the land. The glass ceiling is real, and it’s buttressed from both sides of the political aisle because the male-dominated establishment has everything to lose if women — who have largely been excluded from positions of great importance in the heirarchy of both parties — suddenly secure their own pathway to the top.

The media hates women, too.

Hence the rapid-fire rat-a-tat-tat of equal parts sexism and misogyny aimed at any woman perceived to be too influential and independent, too in control of her own supporters and organization. The media likes women who depend on the media itself for their power…the actresses, authors, singers, and public figures who need to say and do what the media wants, if these women want to keep receiving favorable coverage in newspapers, magazines, and televised gabfests.

When someone like Hillary Clinton comes along and dares to threaten the permanence of that glass ceiling, the media needs to destroy her because that’s not the script they approved for her. If she’d succeed, decades of keeping women “in their places” would fail. The establishment just can’t handle a shake-up like that.

When a woman like Governor Palin enters the arena and flat-out refuses to play the media’s games, they pounce on her, because they need to make an example of her, or risk other women in the future thinking they don’t have to abide by the media’s rules. Ladies, you are just not allowed to threaten the impotent little men behind the great curtains of power (“So, stop trying!”, shouts the media).

Hillary’s presidential campaign suffered because the media was able to attack her for more than a full year before the November 2008 election, hammering away at her status as “front-runner” and repeatedly running the meme that the nomination was hers to lose. This was actually not the case at all, because the narrative was very much written at the DNC that Obama would be the nominee, because the party wanted to make history with a black president before a female one. Truth be told, they still don’t care about electing a woman to anything.

The media, always eager to brutalize any woman for daring to step outside her assigned bounds, loved the notion of building Hillary into that paper “front runner”, just to tear her down so an epic narrative could be written about Obama vanquishing the Clintons, destroying the old Democrat Party, and creating a new Obama-party in his own image as “The One”. The Great and Powerful Exotic Oz!

2008 will one day be looked back on by historians as the year when almost every “journalist” in this country engaged in nonstop masturbatory fiction, ascribing to Obama every dream they’d ever personally held and transforming him into a mythic, godlike figure…the American Pharaoh…who needed a monstrous, haggard, witch of a woman as his foil. This is the picture they quite unfairly painted of Hillary Clinton — a woman who dared to go after what she wanted, was savaged for it, and became the wicked witch — in endless political cartoons –who evilly tried to halt Obama’s ascension to greatness.”Surrender, Hillary!”, the media, the Left, and the Cocktail Party GOP establishment all shouted together.

Governor Palin knows full well what the media and the establishtment combined to do to Hillary Clinton, so she ingeniously refused to let herself ever be called “the frontrunner” for the Republican nomination in 2012.

Palin smartly allowed Romney to be the frontrunner, so he can be the one the media tears down, since “journalists” rarely stumble upon new ideas. The narrative of “look how the mighty frontrunner has fallen!” is one they enjoyed writing so much in 2008 that they were sure to revel in it again now. These people rarely come up with new ideas. If they were writing in Hollywood instead of at Politico.com, they’d be the ones churning out all those lame, lackluster, remakes of bad 70s and 80s films.

Governor Palin did not allow herself to be an anointed or expected heir to the nomination because she knew the media would just recycle the old anti-Hillary playbook and relish snatching that frontrunner status from her. They wanted to stage this remake of 2008 Hillary bashing, recast with an Alaskan, and the Governor refused to indulge them.

Instead, Governor Palin broke all the rules and has essentially played head games with the media since the McCain campaign ended. She knows exactly what drives these clowns nuts, and delights in pushing all their buttons. It’s clear to anyone who’s seen footage of the Governor on her old high school basketball team where she learned these moves. She is masterful at psyching out her opponents. She excels in schooling fools.

And any Republican running for office needs to understand one simple fact: the media is your opponent, as much as any Democrat you’ll face in a general election.

When conservatives in particular run for office, they are always up against not just a Democrat and the media, but the Cocktail Party GOP establishment too.

It’s three-on-one from the get go, and Governor Palin is someone smart enough to try to even her own odds.

2. Allow other candidates to be called “unelectable”, amongst other media memes, so SHE can be the alternative.

With Governor Palin refusing to officially announce her presidential bid when the media would have wanted her to, she forced other candidates like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry to enter the fray, so they could be demolished by the media and deemed “unelectable” for various and sundry reasons.

This is another lesson to be learned from what the media did to Hillary Clinton in the leadup to the early Democrat primaries back in 2007-2008.

“Unelectable” was one of the whisper campaigns used against Hillary, with the media assisting Obama by training many voters to parrot “she just can’t win!” to any canvassers knocking on their doors on Hillary’s behalf. In Hillary’s case, the media kept insisting Hillary would lose in a general election because of “Clinton baggage”, because people were still upset she never divorced her husband, or because “people weren’t ready for a woman in office”.

I worked the 2008 campaign for Hillary, and heard these cliches over and over in the leadup to the Iowa Caucus.

At the same time, the media worked hard to make sure voters were terrified of voicing “unelectable” concerns about Obama, with people like Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, and Keith Olbermann insisting that anyone who made note of Obama’s inexperience, his lack of executive leadership, and his dearth of accomplishments was just racist.

RAACIST! RAACIST, RAACIST, RAAACIST! For asking anything at all about Obama or his record.

The media was able to aim all of its attention at Hillary, encouraging the “unelectable” meme against her, while simultaneously threatening the public with accusations of racism for any and all criticism of Obama.

In 2011, Governor Palin has expertly avoided the same thing happening to her, because it’s Bachmann and Perry who are being called “unelectable”, with the media working hard to savage the two of them while Palin stands on the sidelines waiting for the frenzy to abate. She knows she will receive more than her fair share of attacks, but she’s very strategically limiting the amount of time she’ll be subjected to them.

Meanwhile, the media’s still pushing Romney as “the likely nominee” and saying narely a negative word about the man (because all of those attacks are being saved for the general election, just like what happened to John McCain…when a 10 year love affair with the media’s darling “marverick” twisted into a nonstop hatefest aimed at McCain to guarantee Obama’s win).

Governor Palin is watching while Bachmann’s being called every name in the book and the media’s lampooning her as a crazy person who is…wait for it…unelectable.

Governor Palin sees the media claiming Perry is…wait for it…unelectable because he’s too caustic, too combatative, and too “unelectably unpresidential”.

You see by now that certain purposefully nebulous and undefined words like “unelectable” or “polarizing” are very casually tossed about by the media, as they chum the waters with this bait, hoping Americans who only casually follow politics will snatch it up. The media knows once hooked on these memes, it’s almost impossible for candidates to disentangle voters from the narrative the media spun.

The competitive “Saracuda” spirit that served Governor Palin so well on the basketball court remains very much a part of her DNA…and her operating strategy for the 2012 nomination.

Before she emerges as an official candidate either later this month or in early September, Governor Palin will have allowed the media to do as much damage as possible to her primary opponents while awaiting the perfect opportunity to make her own presence known.

She’s got their number, you betcha.

3. Let the media vet — or, more apt, rip apart — competitors before revealing her true intentions.

This is the very heart of what sank Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, because the media refused to vet Obama, before or after he became the official Democrat nominee.

Because Hillary announced her candidacy so early, she was the prime focus of media attention from Day One. The lazy “journalists” assigned to cover the campaign delighted in rehashing old attacks from the 90s or just sloppily calling Hillary “polarizing” or “unelectable” several different ways in three or four paragraphs before calling it a day. The media decided it wanted Obama to win, so it didn’t want to risk uncovering anything unflattering about him. Having Hillary Clinton to punch around, all day, every day, gave the media something to do besides investigating who Obama really was or what he would do to the country if elected our president.

Governor Palin has expertly avoided becoming the center and focus of all attention in the 2012 Republican nomination race, which is an impressive feat considering how much more interesting she is than any of her competitors.

Palin knows when she walks into a room, the attention naturally gravitates towards her, because people WANT to know more about her, they WANT to hear her speak, and they know they are in the presence of someone they will tell their grandkids about whenever they are lucky enough to meet her.

By keeping her distance, Palin has forced the media to talk about Bachmann, Perry, and other 2012 hopefuls instead of just fixating nonstop coverage on Palin herself (which, truth be told, the media really wants to do).

This way, when Governor Palin actually does enter the race, she won’t have to do all the vetting and investigating of her opponents herself. She won’t be in Hillary’s situation where the media flat-out refuses to ever write a single word vetting an opponent, because all the attention was focused squarely on herself.

4. Take down the establishment elite before they even see her attacks coming.

If you saw “The Undefeated”, you know full well Governor Palin has a history of clobbering the Cocktail Party GOP establishment, which most certainly deserved to be clobbered. And then some.

Palin understands what the Cocktail Party is all about — the status quo — and how it enables the Left to do all the terrible things it does to this country, because the establishment fears putting its own comforts at risk by upsetting the decades-in-practice, good old boys’ rapport that very much exists between the power brokers of the Democrat and Republican parties.

At their highest levels, Democrats and Republicans are often in cahoots, because the elite on either side has a vested interest in protecting their counterparts across the aisle.

Governor Palin doesn’t care about any of these people, and would certainly enjoy booting them all out of power, since she’s never benefitted from any of this sycophancy and cronyism. And never will, clearly. The establishment hates her, she hates them, and Governor Palin wouldn’t have it any other way.

By not announcing a presidential bid, as she was clearly expected to do, Governor Palin prevented the Cocktail Party GOP establishment from doing to her what the DNC establishment elites did to Hillary Clinton. Palin knows the Cocktail Party wants Romney to be the man who loses to Obama in 2012, but she refuses to let the establishment give Obama a pass in 2012 like the one he was handed on a silver platter by McCain in 2008.

If you remember, McCain essentially gave up his presidential campaign in September of 2008 and refused to allow Governor Palin to go on the offensive the way she wanted to. The Cocktail Party GOP establishment was terrified of being called RAAACIST! for challenging Obama on anything or subjecting him to the direct criticism a presidential campaign normally requires. Governor Palin chafed at these limitations and seemingly formed a personal decision to never allow Obama to have it so easy again.

She’s lived rent-free in his nightmares ever since.

The media, the Left, and the Cocktail Party GOP establishment are all clearly against her — and Governor Palin knows it.

If anything she ever does in her presidential campaign perplexes you, trust the Governor to know what she’s doing, since her personal history is rife with examples of her outsmarting the establishment time and time again.

She is, I truly believe, the best political thinker of her generation.

5. Cultivate a network of individual, personal support on the ground BEFORE hiring the consulting teams and making the campaign official.

Most importantly of all, the biggest lesson Governor Palin learned from Hillary Clinton’s 2008 failings was to cultivate a campaign network that’s bottom-up instead of top-down.

Though social networking was still relatively new in 2008 (and iPhones were only released in the middle of the campaign), Hillary’s top-tier team really didn’t make any large-scale successful efforts to get regular, individuals engaged in the campaign in a substantive way.

There were a lot of big events, fundraisers, rallies, and the like, with the social networking used mainly to keep people informed of where they could go to stand and listen to Hillary speak in person, or maybe do some phonebanking.

The campaign was directed by consultants and various experts, many of them longtime Clinton confidants, who decided where and when things should happen and how everything should be run. Very little in terms of ideas or energy was ever really absorbed from on-the-ground supporters and carried to higher levels. Everyone in the big offices believed they knew best, since they elected Bill Clinton to office twice and saw this as merely their third time cooking with the old formula.

Governor Palin’s 2012 presidential campaign will be unlike anything that’s come before it, because the energy fueling it really comes from individual, average, Americans who are exicted to see her run for the presidency and are committed to doing everything they can do to help her.

Few are waiting for a directive to come down from an official Palin 2012 campaign to tell them what needs to be done.

People have been organizing for some time, countering the media’s lies, working their email and Facebook networks to pool together as Palin supporters in their areas.

Everything that David Axlerod aggressively astro-turfed and fabricated for Obama in 2008 is happening organically on its own for Governor Palin.

She’s running.

Her supporters know it.

The media, as always, is clueless.

The Cocktail Party GOP establishment is, in a word, stupid.

All the while, the momma grizzly sizes up her competition, dedicates her trademarked knowing stare, and readies herself to launch into the campaign on her own terms, with absolutely all the might God gave her.

She’s going to win, too, because the woman’s clearly on a mission and has all the right intentions, right when she’s needed the most.

It really is her moment.

She’s the best hope this country has got.

Please help her in any way you possibly can!