Republican Reaction to Sarah Palin Resignation

Here's a small sampling of Republican reaction to Sarah Palin's resignation announcement. Enjoy!

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK): "I am deeply disappointed that the governor has decided to abandon the State and her constituents before her term has concluded."

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA): "It’s astounding. I’d think if you want to run for president… the forum of a governorship would be a better forum that just being a private citizen."

Republican strategist Karl Rove: "Well, [Republican insiders] are a little perplexed, because if she wanted to escape the ethics investigations and save the taxpayers money she's now done that, but it's sort of sent a signal that if you do this kind of thing to a sitting governor like her, you can drive her out of office..." Rove added that Palin might be "putting herself on a national stage that she might not be quite ready to operate on."

Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR): "Well, it's a risky strategy and nobody knows whether it's gonna pay off or not, and even if she did get out primarily because of the feeling of being chased, that's not gonna stop if she continues in politics...hastily calling a news conference that ended up raising more questions than it did answer them...you don't call a press conference that creates questions, you call one to resolve them...there are people who are going to say, 'if they chase you out of this, it won't get any easier for you at other levels of the stage.'"

Republican strategist Steve Duprey: "If she doesn't like the heat in the rather cold kitchen of Alaska, imagine what it's going to be like when she goes to a state like South Carolina or New Hampshire or Iowa."

Republican strategist Ed Rollins: "Friday was a disaster for her, both in the sense that she was very incoherent in articulating what it was, why she was quitting, and what she wanted to do with it."

Republican strategist Bill Kristol: "It's high risk. She's really all-in here. She has no safety net...She's really just getting out there and it's going to depend on her talents and abilities...She had had an interesting political career and I don't rule her out. The odds are against her, but the odds were against her anyway." Kristol also "compared [Palin's] level of experience to that of Barack Obama" and said her decision was a sound one in "a world where people don't value years of experience in Washington, or even conceivably two terms as governor of Alaska."

Radio Host/Blowhard Rush Limbaugh: "...I think all of this is just speculation, we don't know what her reasons for doing this yet are...everybody's guessing...all I know is that if Sarah Palin has any desire...for a future, be it in politics, in media or whatever, she's going to have to do it in the lower 48, she cannot do it in Alaska...I don't think this precludes her running for office down the road, the presidency in 2012 at all...When you have so many establishment types, inside-the-Beltway elite establishment types...just so eager to destroy this woman, it means they're still scared to death of her."

Fox News contributor Liz Trotta: "Then we have Sarah Palin...the sheer weirdness of this news conference caught everybody's attention. But you know it's very easy to say that the liberal media is caving in on her, and yes they are, but she has given them a lot of raw meat. The woman is inarticulate, undereducated...I pose this question, what do you think William F. Buckley would have thought of her as the standard bearer for the conservative party. I think a lot of this criticism is well deserved...She asks for it herself, doesn't she? This is one of the rare cases where I think all the liberal stylists like Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins and the rest of them really have a case; I mean, she just begs for adjectives for adjectives like 'flaky' and 'wacky'...This is a woman who has used her good looks and her gender to really get ahead in the political world...We're not talking about a great stateman of profound experience whose banner is integrity, we're talking about somebody who right from the get-go has been a flashy person who gets into a lot of trouble and really has no credentials for any job."

Sarah Palin: "Critics are spinning, so hang in there as they feed false info on the right decision made as I enter last yr in office to not run again."