Danielle Crittenden watched a Palin speech in Ontario:
If you tried to parse it, you couldn’t. There was not a single memorable line, not a single new political idea, not a single proffered solution beyond the cliché of “needing new solutions.” And when the moderator “opened the floor to questions, guess what? Even those questions had to be written down by the tables and submitted in advance, to be selectively chosen by the moderator. Our table mischievously submitted, “Who is your favorite Canadian Prime Minister?” but for some reason it wasn’t asked.
Here's a passage from the speech:
I’m wanting to, though, kind of shift away from the political. I’m just getting off the trough from doing a lot of Tea Parties across the US, man those are a blast. They’re rowdy and they’re wild and it’s just another melting pot, there’s just diversity there and all walks of life and all forms of partisanship and non partisanship just wanting good things to happen in this part of the world. It’s been a blast. The shift from the political, so now that I have that shift from the political but still have that desire to talk about the economy and talk about energy and resources and national security and all those things. I was telling Todd, okay, this is like [inaudible] on the vice presidential campaign trail, where you never really knew what you were getting into when you get into that line before you were interviewed. Obviously, sometimes I never knew what I was getting into in an interview. Obviously!
Obviously! It's like some kind of id with a gerund-propagator. Saletan's reading of her brand:
Sarah Palin thinks Barack Obama is a wimp.
She’s been going around to Tea Party rallies, invoking the spirit of revolutionary Boston and castigating Obama for failing to exalt American power and punish our adversaries. She seems blissfully unaware that the imperial arrogance she’s preaching isn’t how the American founders behaved. It’s how the British behaved, and why they lost. Palin represents everything the original Tea Party was against.
Bernstein's feeling:
For a normal candidate in a healthy party, Palin's cashing in would be a pretty strong indication that she will ultimately pull back from contesting the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2012. Since neither applies, here, I recommend Andrew Sullivan's comments; he thinks she's a formidable candidate for the nomination (see also Chris Bowers). I'm not convinced, but I also disagree with those who count her completely out. Party leaders, whatever their ideological positions, would have to be nuts or completely cut off from reality to allow her to walk away with the nomination -- but of course there's a serious debate on whether that's the case (the latter, not the former). And as I've said Palin is an excellent test. Meanwhile, most people who wanted to be president would hesitate to wring every dollar out of their celebrity, but I think we all know that Palin isn't most people.
One thing on which I am certain: the Boston Herald's fantasies notwithstanding, there's no way that any GOP nominee would voluntarily put Sarah Palin on the bottom half of the ticket.
Does Jonathan know how shameless Romney is? He'd do anything for the White House.