Sarah Palin versus Republican 'blue bloods'

In the ongoing drama that is Sarah Palin’s political reality show, score this past week “Blue bloods 3, Palin zip.”

Joining the growing number of conservatives critical of Palin were former Republican congressman (now MSNBC host) Joe Scarborough, Republican campaign consultant Ed Rollins, and columnist George Will.

You could say she asked for it – lumping George H.W. and Barbara Bush with “the blue bloods who want to pick and choose” who should be on the Republican presidential ticket. In her wry way, the former first lady had suggested that Palin should stay in Alaska rather than run for the White House.

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Earlier, the former Alaska governor seemed to suggest that she was in the same league with the Republican icon who also had been an entertainer. (See “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” on the Discovery Channel’s TLC affiliate.)

“Wasn't Ronald Reagan an actor?” she asked on Fox News. “Wasn't he in 'Bedtime for Bonzo,' Bozo, something?”

That was too much for Rollins, as it had been for Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan a week earlier.

“To paraphrase the late Sen. Lloyd Bentsen's comments to Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice presidential debate: I knew Ronald Reagan, and you're no Ronald Reagan,” Rollins wrote on CNN’s website. “You might as well compare yourself to Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt.”

“If you want to be a player, go to school and learn the issues,” he continued. “Put smart people around you and listen to them. If you want to be taken seriously, be serious…. If you want to be a serious presidential candidate, get to work. If you want to be an imitator of Ronald Reagan, go learn something about him and respect his legacy. If you want to be a gadfly, just keep doing what you're doing.”

Columnist George Will says if Palin truly wanted to be on the national political stage, she should have taken a different course when she and John McCain lost the election two years ago.

“After the 2008 campaign, she had two things she had to do,” Will said on ABC’s “This Week with Christiane Amanpour.” “She had to go home to Alaska and study, and she had to govern Alaska well. Instead, she quit halfway through her first term and shows up in the audience of ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and other distinctly non-presidential venues.”

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