CPAC Chairman: Palin Not Ready for Presidential Run

Ronald Kessler-Newsmax).Sarah Palin needs to stop whining about unfair media coverage and get over the fact that some people don’t like her, Dave Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, tells Newsmax.

“You’ve got to recognize that there are people who want you to fail,” Keene says. “And if you spend your time worrying about them, or whining about what they say, at the very least it’ll get you off your game, because you ought to be worried about what you’re going to do, not about what they’re going to do to you.

“Conservatives like her, but you’ve got to have more than that,” Keene says. “You’ve got to be more than a rock star. If in fact she’s interested in the presidency, she has got to establish herself as someone you can envision in the Oval Office. And it’s become more difficult to envision than it was at the time of the election.”

Unlike former governors like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, or Mitt Romney, Palin has not established her credentials before leaving office.

“Going out and simply giving speeches without that foundation behind you is difficult,” Keene observes. “What she’s proved is that she’s a very popular person, she’s an incredible political property, in the early stages as governor she made a real impression, she was a reformer, she was all of those things. But now she hasn’t followed through. Her pipeline project is up in the air, and it’s as if she dropped it to run after something else. But she hasn’t even made clear what it is she’s running after.”

Taking shots at the media is not a winning strategy, Keene notes.

“That’s like complaining about the weather,” he says. “It’s going to rain anyway, so you’ve got to just learn to live with it . . . it doesn’t do any good to be bitter. What you need to do is to calculate where your friends and your enemies are, who you need and what you need, and if you’re going to get your message out and you’re going to play on the big stage, those people are all going to be there. So you don’t kowtow or pussyfoot to them, but on the other hand you don’t spend your time whining that they’re not your friends.”