The American Spectator

The Spectacle Blog

John Fund's column today explains how Sarah Palin's enemies used Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests to bog down her administration.

To clarify some points in Fund's column, one source explained to me that, of 230 FOIA requests received by Palin's office since she became governor, 190 were filed since Sept. 1, 2008 -- that is, 83 percent of the requests were filed in the 10 months since Palin was chosen as the Republican vice-presidential candidate. Many of these FOIA requests were massive -- one request was 24,000 pages -- and some were obviously fishing expeditions requiring that the governor's office produce thousands of e-mails and other records.

"Instead of governing, her staff was spending all their time responding to FOIA requests, not to mention all these ridiculous ethics complaints," the source said.

Assessing the situation, Fund concludes in his column "that Ms. Palin most likely will not run for president -- in 2012, at least." However, both the arc of Palin's career and the current political landscape are so unprecedented that any prediction of the future is at best an educated guess.

A 2012 presidential campaign would not be formally organized until after the November 2010 mid-term elections. That gives Palin a full 16 months to re-invent her public image, assemble the core of a campaign staff and establish a nationwide political support structure. A difficult task in such a constricted time-frame, with nearly the entire GOP establishment lined up against her, but difficult is not the same thing as impossible.