If you were running for president, who is the one person whose advice you'd definitely want to follow? Why, it's lipsticked hockey pitbull and failed reality TV star (oh, and failed governor, too) Sarah Palin!
Lucky for Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin's giving it away for free:
“Romney, he has said before that he doesn’t want to have to light his hair on fire. Well, there are a lot of his base supporters, independents who are saying, ‘Well, light our hair on fire, then! Remind us how important it is that we get engaged in this presidential election because it is the election of our lifetime,’” Palin told Sean Hannity of Fox News.
Right. The best thing Mitt Romney could do is to torch himself, but, barring that, at least set a match to his lunatic base. (Well, the base of the Republican Party; word's still out on whether they're
his yet.)
This immolation strategy, as MJ Lee at Politico points out, refers to Romney's comments during the crazy-off known as the Republican primary season:
“You know, it’s very easy to excite the base with incendiary comments,” he said. “We’ve seen throughout the campaign that if you’re willing to say really outrageous things that are accusatory and attacking President Obama that you’re going to jump up in the polls. You know I’m not willing to light my hair on fire to try and get support.”
Republicans made plenty of outrageous attacks and accusations about the president during the primary; some of them did not learn from the Palin example that "incendiary comments" about Barack Obama aren't actually useful in, you know,
defeating Barack Obama. Ergo, Operation Don't Do Anything the McCain Campaign Did. Palin was the queen of incendiary comments in 2008, soaking her hair in gasoline and going to town with a blowtorch. And while Palin seems to have a hard time remembering this teeny, tiny fact, she and McCain did not actually
win with this strategy.
Palin does still remember, though, how mean and gotcha the media was to her:
She suggested that Romney will want to play it safe by picking someone who is more of a “known commodity” than she was in 2008, “so that the media doesn’t do what the media did to me — making things up and kind of thrashing somebody’s reputation and record in order to distract from what the election really was supposed to be about.”
Yes, he might want to pick someone who is more of a "known commodity"—a very polite euphemism for "not the dumbest broad in America." And yes, Sarah, the Romney camp is already ahead of you, with the aforementioned Operation No, Seriously, Do
Not Do Anything the McCain Campaign Did, an intricate plan based on the
belief that Sarah Palin was the worst thing that ever happened to Republicans and that she has "poisoned the well" for lady Republicans who will never, ever get to be considered for the Mitt ticket in case, on account of also being ladies just like Sarah Palin, they lady-suck also. That's why they're looking for an
"incredibly boring white guy," just to make extra double super sure they don't end up with a giant Palin-like turd on the ticket. But that's no reason they shouldn't listen to her sage and experienced words of advice about how to get electorally humiliated by Barack Obama.
If Sarah Palin thinks immolation—by way of saying totally crazy and outlandish things about the president—is the key to victory, you can bet Romney's having himself coated in asbestos right about now.