Posts Tagged ‘step down’

I’ll betcha Sarah Palin’s mother had to ask that question often when she was a child: What’s Sarah up to now?

I’ll be talking about that along with Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn Monday early morning on “Canada AM”, which is CTV’s equivalent of the “Today Show”, so I’ve had to think about the answer to the question more than I might have liked.

Palin has officially stepped down from her post as governor of Alaska as of today. And we’re all abuzz asking why and what is she going to do next: Were some of those ethics charges about to bring her down so she struck a deal? Was she unable to deal with the stress, as her daughter’s baby-daddy Levi Johnston speculated? Is she just after the money she can make with her book and speaking engagements? Was she angry about her treatment by the media? Did she calculate that if she wants to run for president in 2012, she’d be better off not racking up more of a record since her political juice with her state legislature seemed to have been heading south?

Any and all of those are possible. And perhaps she simply had the audacity of nope. As in “Nope, I won’t finish my term because who wants to be a lame duck?” By that logic, if my child is going to reach majority at 18, should I stop being a mother when he’s 16 1/2 so that I’m not a lame duck? If the PTA president is elected to a two-year term, should she step down after a year-and-a-half so as not be a lame duck? Or wouldn’t we call all of those examples blatant abnegation of responsibility?