Palin lights up conservative conference, is mum on her future
Former Alaska governor elicits whoops at her jokes but fails to win support as a possible presidential candidate
Channelling Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream in skintight black jeans and big Republican hair, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin lit up a hootin’ and hollerin’ Conservative Political Action Conference in suburban Washington Saturday, labelling U. S. President Barack Obama an outright liar while championing “Us little people, us clinging to our God, our guns, our grassroots.”
“More background checks? Dandy idea, Mr. President,” she said, blazing away at the president’s gun- control efforts. “Should’ve started with yours.”
But Palin, the unsuccessful candidate for the vice- presidency in 2008 who abruptly resigned her post in Juneau a year later, did not disclose any hints to her own political future beyond a call to delegates to comb the nation’s school boards and Tea Party rallies for suitable candidates for future elections.
This fall, according to a publisher’s news release, she will release “a fun, festive, thoughtprovoking book” that will encourage readers “to see what is possible when we unite in defence of our faith and ignore the politically correct Scrooges who would rather take Christ out of Christmas.” But even this opus went unplugged at CPAC in favour of sniping at “the permanent political class in Washington” that she once campaigned to join.
Introduced by Calgary- born Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas as a wise Mahatma who “drives the mainstream media bat- crap crazy,” Palin drew repeated standing ovations from hundreds of the Caucasian collegians who made up the vast majority of CPAC attendees. But few of the contra- liberals who whooped at her punchlines declared that they would support her at the ballot box, should she decide to run for the White House in 2016.
Several hours after Palin spoke, the results of the annual CPAC straw poll were revealed, relegating her to 10th place out of more than 60 putative Republican candidates. Libertarian Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio led the survey, which was skewed by the refusal of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to be listed.
Palin was preceded to the stage on Saturday by a panoply of former, failed presidential hopefuls, including former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who delivered a lengthy monologue about the invention of the electric light bulb, and Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who excoriated the president for exposing the United States to “enemies waging deadly cyber- attacks,” for employing five chefs aboard his personal aircraft and two fulltime cinema projectionists in the White House, for consorting in Las Vegas with Beyonce and Jay- Z, and for not wanting to cure cancer, Alzheimer’s disease or juvenile diabetes.
“We are the people who truly care about people in this country,” Rep. Bachmann said. “We’ll get gas to $ 2 a gallon — half the current price — because we have the uniquely American life blood as our signature. We do it because we love, we do this because we care, this is the movement of love.”
Following this romantic manifesto, Sarah Palin prescribed “an adult conversation about our country” that would have to begin with an acceptance of Obama’s re- election.
“We came in second, out of two,” she said. “Second on the dogsled team, the view never changes, and it ain’t a pretty view.”
“Remember no drama Obama?” Palin asked. “Now it’s ALL- drama Obama. We don’t have leadership coming out of Washington, we have reality television — except its really bad reality TV, and the American people tuned out a long time ago.”
(“Candidate or Kardashian?” asked the inside- the- Beltway newspaper Politico of Palin, whose own reality series of Alaskan adventures was not renewed last year by the Discovery Channel and whose tenure as a FOX News analyst similarly has faded out. And the Washington Post recently described her as “a punching bag that has been slowly deflating since 2008.”)
In a dig at New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to restrict the sale of Alaska- sized containers of sweetened soft drinks, Palin interrupted her customary paean to cowboys, fishermen and hockey moms to slurp from a Big Gulp cola she had stashed behind the podium.
But a few minutes later — and five years on from her “lipstick on a pit bull” debutante moment at the Republican National Convention — even some of the conferencegoers who wailed with delight at Palin’s speech withheld their support for her putative candidacy.
“I see her as a leader, but a leader in the media sense,” said Samantha Forhan of Phoenix, chairman of Arizona College Republicans. “I think the liberals would bash her too much for doing TV reality shows.”
“She’s an average person with average intelligence and it shocks people that she’s of average intelligence,” said Jacqueline Quander, a sophomore at Tufts University in Massachusetts, a self- described independent voter, and one of the very, very few African- Americans in attendance. “She still has that power to inspire people, she still has those wisps of brilliance. But I wouldn’t trust her to write policy.
“If you’re not smarter than the average bear, you might think she’s making a policy speech, but it’s really just a rallying cry. She speaks with little or no factual background. She’s never going to be president, and neither is Joe Biden, and neither am I.”