Politics

Sarah Palin Was Sort of Right on One Thing in 2008

The former governor and perhaps future senatorial candidate of Alaska is using her Twitter account to make one thing clear: Ever since she emerged on the national stage, basically everything she has said has been right. We evaluate.

By Philip Bump
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This article is from the archive of our partner .

The former governor and perhaps future senatorial candidate of Alaska is using her Twitter account to make one thing clear. Ever since she emerged on the national stage, basically everything she has said has been right.

She was right about Fannie and Freddie.

The tweet:

The issue: The "it" to which she refers is her argument in September 2009 that the mortgage companies had "gotten too big and too expensive" for taxpayers.

The vindication: The president's announcement on Tuesday that he planned to wind down government ownership of the two agencies, which, in his words, "were allowed to make big profits buying mortgages, knowing that if their bets went bad, taxpayers would be left holding the bag."

The truth: At the time Palin spoke, the government had only announced its planned takeover of the two agencies a few hours previously — a takeover that hadn't yet gone into effect. At the time, the Huffington Post spoke with several economists, who disagreed with Palin's assessment.

Ultimately, the takeover did cost taxpayers a lot of money — in part because of their confidence while making bad bets before the economic crash that they would be relieved by the government.

Rating: Palin was partially right.

She was right about wanting to talk about Jeremiah Wright.

The tweet:

The issue: Palin knew that Obama was up to no good and tried to warn all of us about him. The Huffington Post transcribed part of the appearance.
"Though I was during the campaign running for VP, I was banned from talking about Jeremiah Wright and Obama's friend, Bill Ayers, the character that he befriended and kicked off his political campaign in the guy's living room," Palin said.

Palin blamed "those elitists, those who are the brainiacs in the GOP machine running John McCain's campaign at the time" for saying "the media would eat us alive" if the vice presidential candidate touched on those issues.

"What it got us was a list of these scandals," Palin said about the "self-censoring" done by the McCain campaign.

The vindication: A second Obama administration wracked by scandals, as delineated on her "redneck whiteboard."

The truth: The "scandals" — even the more universally agreed-upon examples from her white board — are not really scandals. Nor is it likely that Palin spending more time talking about Rev. Wright would have either won her the vice presidency or kept the IRS from flagging Tea Party groups for additional scrutiny.

Rating: Palin was wrong.

She was right about how Obama's antipathy toward special needs kids.

The tweet:

The issue: When Obama referred to his poor bowling as qualifying him for the Special Olympics, it revealed his antipathy to special needs children.

The vindication: A Daily Caller story titled "Obamacare hurts parents of special-needs children." It is about how a component of Obamacare would make it harder to pay for special education programs through the use of Flexible Spending Accounts.

Obamacare institutes a brand new $2,500 cap for FSAs, which will make more money taxable and could raise $13 billion in taxes for the federal government over the next decade.

“Before Obamacare passed, there was no limit to how much money you could put into your FSA at work,” Ryan Ellis, tax policy director at Americans for Tax Reform, told The Daily Caller.

The truth: The new rule wouldn't eliminate the savings plans, just make them taxable above a certain amount. It's a component of a healthcare bill passed by Congress and signed into law by the president. (Americans for Tax Reform, it's worth noting, wants a repeal of all 2014 Obamacare provisions.)

The rating: Palin was wrong.

She was right about death panels.

The tweet:

The issue: Palin wrote in opposition to Obamacare in a Facebook post in August 2009.

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care.

Nearly every media outlet in the universe noted that such panels were not proposed.

The vindication: Fox News' Sean Hannity interpreted remarks from former Vermont governor Howard Dean to suggest that the panels will exist.

The truth: They still will not.

Rating: Palin was wrong.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.