Sarah Palin: The campaign begins

“She’s running for president,” said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com. Sarah Palin may not yet have formally declared herself a candidate for 2012, but she came pretty close last week, telling Fox’s Chris Wallace that “it would be absurd to not consider what it is that I can potentially do to help our country.” Palin solidified her position “as the leader of the opposition” during her $100,000 speech to last week’s Tea Party Convention, with “a brutal, take-no-prisoners attack on President Obama” that echoed all of Fox News’ usual talking points. Oddly enough, said John Avlon in TheDaily Beast.com, Palin spent her first 15 minutes speaking about her vague ideas on foreign policy—not a major issue for Tea Partiers—before calling for tax cuts for everyone and a balanced budget. A platform that unrealistic is a “dead giveaway that she’s running for president.”

If she is, said Mike Lupica in the New York Daily News, Palin has “delusions of grandeur.” Watching her typically garbled and platitude-filled speech last week—the crib notes for which she amateurishly scribbled on her hand—you could “actually feel yourself getting dimmer by the minute, like a dying light bulb.” When she chirped, “How’s that Hopey Changey stuff workin’ out for ya?” she sounded for all the world like Tina Fey doing her Sarah Palin impersonation. American voters may be gullible, but the chances of this clueless poseur winning 51 percent of the vote “are vanishingly small.”

Don’t be so sure, said Michael Wolff in Newser.com. Yes, Palin is truly an awful speaker. In her singsong, sarcasm-tinged voice, “she garbles syntax, flubs lines, loses her train of thought”—and yet you find yourself “hanging on every word.” It’s not what she says, but how she emotionally engages with crowds of people who feel, as she does, chronically aggrieved. In our carefully scripted but largely disconnected political culture, Palin creates an electrifying spectacle every time she steps before a microphone. As an alternative to the status quo, she “might really catch us by surprise.” In a way, she already has, said Marc Ambinder in TheAtlantic.com. With her disdain for “the rule of experts,” she captures the popular mood more effectively than any other Republican. As a senior advisor to one of Palin’s Republican rivals told me, “If the primaries were this year, I suspect she’d be nominated.”

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