Sarah Palin, queen of the tea party.
Photograph: Rebecca Cook/Reuters
When someone bounds on stage before a roomful of conservatives and shouts "I'm so proud to be an American! Happy birthday Ronald Reagan!", it can mean only one thing: Sarah Palin is running for the presidency. Normal people don't begin conversations with those two sentences, but presidential candidates do, all the time.
Palin was speaking on Saturday before one of the nascent (and probably evanescent) tea party movement groupings, in Nashville, for a reputed $100,000 fee. And she probably gave her money's worth.
The first half of Palin's speech was designed for the television audience – the speech was covered on all news channels – and so was a relative standard campaign speech for a Republican presidential primary candidate. (America's best days are ahead of it. Ronald Reagan. Smaller government. Peace through strength. And so on.) The second half was the money-maker for the tea party paymasters and had a more markedly populist tone. "How's that hopey-changey stuff working out for you?" Palin asked the crowd.
As usual with a Palin speech it had some sentences that strained the limits of grammar. But it was much improved and underlines that she's a serious candidate, not matter how quickly Democrats might dismiss her. She has a set of themes she hammers away at, and now she has found a way to sound serious. "We need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lecturn," she said, speaking from a lecturn. The content still doesn't bear close examination – one moment she was calling for "carbon free energy" and the next demanding more off-shore drilling – but a Palin speech is more about mood than thinktank source material.
The weirdest part of the evening came not during the speech but during the following Q&A session. Asked what she thought that a Republican-controlled congress's top three priorities should be, she answered: stop spending, energy policy and ... well, here's the whole quote, judge for yourself:
I think, kind of tougher to put our arms around, but allowing America's spirit to rise again by not being afraid to kind of go back to some of our roots as a God fearing nation where we're not afraid to say especially in times of potential trouble in the future here, where we're not afraid to say, you know, we don't have all the answers as fallible men and women so it would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again. To have people involved in government who aren't afraid to go that route, not so afraid of the political correctness that you know – they have to be afraid of what the media said about them if they were to proclaim their alliance to our creator.
So, one of the US congress's top priorities should be ... asking for divine intervention from God? "I can think of two words right now that scare liberals: President Palin," the moderator ended the evening by saying. A brief chant of "Run, Sarah, run," broke out, although not one shared by the whole room. Proving, perhaps, that you don't have to be a liberal to be worried by Sarah Palin.