Can Sarah Palin style herself as Thatchers second coming?
Visiting Margaret Thatcher is a traditional rite among Republican presidential aspirants – Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney all pitched up on her doorstep in 2008. But Sarah Palin, who announced on her Facebook site this week that she hopes to secure a meeting with “one of my political heroines, the ‘Iron Lady’,” has a more obvious claim to be Thatcher’s heir. She’s an attractive woman from Nowhere Fancy, just as Thatcher was, and snobs deplore her for it, just as they deplored Thatcher. That said, if Palin hopes to style herself as the second coming she has a few things to learn. She might wish to study Thatcher’s disciplined command of arguments, facts and statistics, for instance. By the time Thatcher was elected, she’d enjoyed a 20-year parliamentary career. Her clearly expressed views – clearly expressed, I stress – about every crisis, problem and debate of concern to Britain were a matter of public record. Palin has neither said nor written a line so far that would al
