Sarah Palin has won the Right Nation 2010 straw poll for potential candidates for resident in 2012. Palin
gathered 19.1 percent at a Chicago-area conference on Sept. 18. Chris Christie
came in second with 16.2 percent. Newt Gingrich third with 13.4 percent and
Mitt Romney fifth with 11.2 percent. Mike Pence, who won the Values Voter
summit, came in 10th with only 2.7 percent. Mike Huckabee, who came in second
in the Values Voter Summit, came in sixth with 9.2 percent.
The poll will show the preferences of grassroots leaders from throughout the
heartland, says the group’s website, with conference attendees from the
Midwestern states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and
Wisconsin, as well as tickets sold outside the Midwest from Florida to
California.
Right Nation 2010 is a joint venture of Republican, conservative, libertarian,
free-market and Tea Party independent organizations and individuals,
facilitated by the 75-year-old United Republican Fund. These groups are
converged, and it is interesting that they are finding their center in Chicago.
These are interesting results from a Chicago group and are probably more
representative of mainstream America than the Values Voter poll. My impression of
the red state/blue state division that so gave Jimmy Carter the willies in his
interview with Brian Williams (worse than the Civil War?) is that it is a natural
and necessary growing pain of our American condition rising to it fullness. Chicago
in this regard is the American city rising in the new millennium as America
finds its center; NY and the eastern cities on the edges recede. It is not
Obama’s city, not Rahm Emanuel’s and no longer the Daleys’. Those days were
transitional. Visionary Frank Lloyd Wright saw the region as a center point: a
Brahma moment between East, West, South and the Great White North. That
relationship has matured in our time. Heartland-based politics is also finding
its center there and it could well be the resting place and the awakening place
of this new political sensibility.
Visit Mr. Quigley's website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.
