Palin: Told You So

Hot Air reports on Sarah Palin's upcoming interview tonight:

She really did, back in the days when expressing even mild skepticism about The One's pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class was cause for having your dirty laundry aired on the national news. From her RNC acceptance speech:

But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed … when the roar of the crowd fades away … when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot — what exactly is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger … take more of your money … give you more orders from Washington … and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world…

Taxes are too high … he wants to raise them. His tax increases are the fine print in his economic plan, and let me be specific.

The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes … raise payroll taxes … raise investment income taxes … raise the death tax … raise business taxes … and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars…

How are you going to be better off if our opponent adds a massive tax burden to the American economy?

Don't forget taxes on health-care benefits. Says Palin to Hannity of our new federal colossus, "It's expanding at such a large degree that if Americans aren't paying attention, unfortunately our country could evolve into something that we do not even recognize."

Now that she's been proven exactly right, how about a show of hands for everyone who thought Palin was a dunce?  Meanwhile, we actually got a complete and total buffoon in Joe Biden, who has to be muzzled periodically for saying stupid stuff that distracts even The One.  Boy, we really dodged a bullet with that whole one-heartbeat-away-from-the Presidency thing, didn't we?

Anyway, Ace of Spades chips in with some analysis on Palin that seems dead-on to me, as well as a warning to the Left:

The public is conditioned to assume things about the working of government: Critically, that no matter who's running the government, the pendulum will only swing a small amount between capitalism and a European-style welfare state. That, basically, one party will only go, say, 10% to the right or left.

Because, historically, that has been pretty much the limit of presidential nudging. Reagan went a bit farther, and Bush, arguably, almost as far as Reagan, but as a general matter presidents don't change things that much. They tend to correct for what the public perceives as the excesses of past administrations of the opposing party. Did Reagan and Bush the Elder go too far towards capitalism? Okay, well here comes Clinton to push it a bit back to the left.

This is generally a fair assumption, and probably what the public expected they'd be getting in an Obama administration. Obama presented himself as a moderate, and the media fell over itself to vouch for him on that score -- even going so far as to "vet" private citizens such as Joe the Plumber who dared to suggest otherwise.

And since then the media has continued flacking for Obama.

So the public has been mostly assuming that Obama's policies, while a change in direction, were just a small but needed correction the other way. And they haven't bothered looking at the actual numbers, because they've been comfortable in their assumptions and haven't questioned the tale the media is telling them.

But it seems that the general public is finally getting savvy to the idea that these budgets aren't just large, aren't just "what Bush did too," and aren't merely "a little worse than Bush." They are entirely unprecedented, except for a brief period during the Second World War.

Obama does still have the recession on his side, as he can claim that he didn't have much to do with it. But as has been said again and again, this dispensation is of limited duration.

The public just doesn't comprehend -- yet -- the enormity of Obama's deficits. They don't yet get that this isn't like Reagan's deficits, or Clinton's early deficits, or Bush the Younger's relatively tiny deficits. These are an order of magnitude bigger then anyone's seen before (or at least since the middle of a World War against the Nazi and Japanese empires), and that's only slowly beginning to sink in.

People don't like admitting they were wrong, and Obama can count on at least that 52% who voted for him for a while. But at some point people are going to decide that admitting they were wrong is less objectionable than supporting this unprecedented -- radical -- level in spending, and they're going to turn on him.

And they're not going to say "I was wrong." There's a more psychologically-palatable way to admit error: I was lied to. And so when they turn, they're going to turn hard, and with emotion.

I just hope this hard, emotional turn happens real quick.  If it doesn't, it may not matter much.

Might want to watch the whole interview tonight. 

There's my two cents.