Sarah Palin Winning Left and Right

Like an NFL receiver who makes a difficult catch and then gets hit high and low simultaneously, Sarah Palin wins the Republican Party’s game ball.

Although accomplishing what no other Republican candidate for national office has in modern times, the Alaska governor was snarled at, mocked, condescended and socially snubbed by pretentious Manhattan and Washington Beltway insiders for not being one of them, for getting too close to the common herd of regular Americans.

No sooner had the far-left elitists done that to the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee than she found herself slandered, vilified and flat lied about — anonymously, of course — by members of her own running mate’s staff even before the Nov. 4 vote was counted.

After that losing election, those “cowardly jerks,” as she had every right to call them, piled it on even more, leaking to the press like a shower with a worn-out washer in a cheap-o motel. Their message was unmistakable: It’s all her fault (certainly not theirs) that the John McCain campaign had been doomed.

The stink those political nomads created had barely begun to drift off the playing field when Sarah was kicked in the teeth by a Columbia University professor writing in The Wall Street Journal as a voice of conservative, intellectual respectability. It seems Sarah’s not that kind of intellectual, either.

If she had sat down and carefully contrived a way to assure her national political future as the brightest light on a rather murky Republican horizon, Sarah Palin could not have come up with a richer scenario.

Just imagine, attacked by “intellectuals” on both the right and the left! You can’t buy PR that bountiful.

It lays out the clear path for her to lead her party to eventual political success, through a vacated gap on the right side of the middle of the line — as they say in football, running downhill all the way.

Thank you, vindictive losers on the Straight Talk campaign express.

Thank you, mean-spirited elitists on the always-loopy left.

Thank you, ineffectual elitists on the no-longer-respectable right.

Here, Sarah, is the game ball you won all on your own. How appropriate it should be handed to you, gratis, by the likes of them.

Give it a good coat of shellac to preserve it from Alaskan winters, plant some lipstick on it, and place it in honor alongside your hockey-mom trophies.

The Republican road back to the White House in 2012 looks a whole heck of a lot clearer and brighter now that it leads right through downtown Wasilla, Alaska (known also as Hometown, USA).

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for Newsmax.com. Read John Perry's columns here.