Sarah Palin as Oprah

Sarah Palin’s weakness as a presidential candidate is that she lost the opportunity to hone her skills as governor of Alaska when she was thrown into the national spotlight.  Even one solid term would have hardened the resume and eliminated doubts on that score.  Since then she has worked her books, the tea party network and all that and has become a legitimate celebrity.

Stepping in and effectively filling Oprah’s shoes is an excellent way to use her talents and this writer has it right.  She will pull the audience and let us be serious. That is why she is here in the first place.  Her intellectual contribution is at best a natural parroting of established dogma and more need not be expected unless she finds and trusts a mentor as Reagan did with Laffer.

It is decision time for the 2012 presidential campaign and it really looks burdensome.  Exiting that race and coming up as the natural replacement for Oprah will even open the door for a much later run at the presidency in 2016.  That is surely not an unattractive option.

Breitbart: Palin Could Be a Conservative Oprah

Tuesday, 17 May 2011 05:27 PM

By Henry J. Reske and Ashley Martella

http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/andrew-breitbart-palin-oprah/2011/05/17/id/396745

Sarah Palin's wide appeal gives her a unique opportunity to step into Oprah Winfrey’s shoes and attract women to the political center-right position, conservative Web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart tells Newsmax.TV.

As such, Palin and her Reaganesque communication skills could do for conservatives what Winfrey has done for liberal views, Brietbart said.

“She has a huge pop cultural capability,” he said. “I think that, in our country, if she aspired to be Oprah Winfrey instead of Barack Obama, she would have a 10-, 20-year reign as a person who could influence people in the middle of the day, specifically women in the middle of the day, and pull them back towards a center-right perspective where Oprah Winfrey has spent the last 20, 25 years indoctrinating people slowly but surely in a liberal point of view.”

Breitbart was quick to note he is not against the former GOP vice-presidential candidate running for president. But the political provocateur stressed that the former Alaska governor's knack for drawing large crowds and her ability to speak around and over the media, a skill she shares with President Ronald Reagan.

Breitbart, who got his start with the websites the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post, recently wrote the book “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World.” The tome chronicles his work in creating websites and the power of new media as a counter to the mainstream media. 

With the Internet, people can do what "60 Minutes" does for “pennies on the dollar,” he said.

“I was there from the beginning, since 1995, and now we’re at the most exciting point because we’re actually defeating the old media,” he said. 

“We’ve given them every warning in the world to correct their business model. We’ve acted as a check and balance and said to Katie Couric, ‘You know, we noticed that you treated Barack Obama in your questioning of him to a different standard than you held Sarah Palin.’ If you’re not going to be fair while proclaiming that you’re an objective journalist, we’re going to become the media.”

It is important to regain control of the American narrative, Breitbart said, asserting that liberals always realized that the United States is a center-right country and that they are outnumbered by the people who believe in the Constitution and individual responsibility.

“In order for them to slowly move a center-right country to the left, they decided to take over and isolate the cultural institutions, Hollywood, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, academia, K-12,” he said. 

“And what they’re able to do starting in kindergarten and all the way up as an accompaniment to your liberal education kids are getting reinforced with MTV, they’re getting reinforced with reality television; they’re getting reinforced with movies and music that affirm the liberal narrative in our culture.

“The only place a person like Andrew Breitbart could even find conservatism was stumbling upon the AM dial. If you listen to the AM dial, you are listening to the conservative narrative. But the rest of our culture, where most people have it as a massive firehose into their mouths, you’re only getting the liberal narrative. 

"What the new media is is a check and balance against that, and it’s a way that we’re trying to drive the conservative narrative and make it so the mainstream media can’t be the only game in town.”