What Palin Could, And Should, Do

With he surprise announcement by Sarah Palin of her resignation, the commentariat is alive with people who are giving her advice (from the Right) or denigrating her (from the Left).

One of the best things I have read is by "Daily Pundit" Bill Quick.

1. Start putting her national team together now. Recruit from the best and the brightest of real conservatism.

2. Ignore her enemies, both in the MSM and the Dem party, and in the liberal wing of the GOP. Define herself on her own terms. No more chat-fests with the likes of Katy Couric.

3. Set out to remake the GOP in her image. This means identifying strong conservative candidates for both the House and the Senate, then supporting them with fundraisers, public appearances, the expertise of her team, and clout with the party itself in both the primaries and the general election.

4. In the process, she should define herself by attacking Obama’s policies without ceasing, and offering real conservative solutions. This doesn’t mean “conservative lite,” or “new conservative” or whatever other euphemisms are currently being pushed for a “conservatism” that is actually liberalism in disguise. She should also make clear that she can work with that wing of the party, but doesn’t support, and will not try to advance, the dogmas of the “moderate conservative” hacks.

5. If she does this right, she can turn the election of 2010 into a referendum on the failed policies and agendas of Obama and the Democrats. If successful - that is, if she helps to greatly reduce or eliminate the Democrat majorities in Congress - she will have set herself up as the savior of the GOP, as the only politician to defeat Obama, and will thus foreclose challenges from other GOP figures.

6. Spend the next year after that building a huge war chest, honing her campaign and her own talents, and then take it directly to Obama himself from late 2011 on.

Here's my suggestion for the key topic she should be focused on: ENERGY.

Outside of glaciers and polar bears, it's what Alaska is known for. It's also the area of Palin's greatest expertise. It also happens to be topic number one for most Americans. Every time they fill their gas tank, every time they pay their electric bills, every time they discuss "cap and trade," every time they see windmills on the horizon and know - in their hearts - that these ugly machines are not going to be the solution, they will think about Sarah Palin.

She will talk persuasively about the Democrats' refusal to tap the billions of barrels of oil in Alaska's wildlife refuge, about denying Americans access to clean coal in Utah, about the refusal of congress to explore for oil and gas off our coasts even as foreign companies are doing exactly that, about congress' refusal to allow the expansion of clean and proven nuclear power plants, the government's wrongheaded policies that make us rely more and more on foreign sources of energy even as they claim to be doing exactly the opposite.

She will be doing something that she does best: connecting with the American people in terms that they can understand. And she will be pointing out that the problem is a bipartisan one. She will have the opportunity to take on pandering and corruption on both sides of the aisle, just as she did in Alaska.

If she does that, she will be able to re-create the coalition that Ronald Reagan had, and we'll see the blue collar crowd who went Democrat in the last election come back to the Republican side.