Palin Unleashes Power Of Tea With Convention Speech Big On Insults, Short On Ideas

The last time Sarah Palin delivered a breathlessly awaited primetime speech at a political convention, the goal was to introduce her to America and convince the Republican establishment that she had the chops to be their vice presidential nominee.

On Saturday night in Nashville, speaking before a crowd of adoring fans at the Tea Party National Convention, Palin needed no introduction. She is already a political celebrity, a conservative star and the de facto head of the growing Tea Party movement. Her animated, folksy and occasionally shocking address to the masses (the masses who paid almost $1,000 to hear her speak, that is) reinforced all of the Palin stereotypes - good and bad - while raising more doubts about her viability as a mainstream political force.

Palin’s nearly hour-long political rant had as its unquestioned target the man now sitting in the seat the former governor of Alaska could very well be aiming for in 2012. All manner of insults were hurled at President Obama from the keynote lectern, met with roaring approval from a cheering crowd chowing down on lobster dinners they received with their pricey tickets. Palin derided the president as a “charismatic guy with a teleprompter” and asserted that the Obama administration’s strategy in the war on terror was dangerous, saying that America needed a”commander-in-chief” to win the war on terror, “not a professor of law.”

Palin spent a good deal of her speech and used many of most powerful zingers focused on foreign policy and the war on terror, issues that she said the president ignored in his recent State of the Union. Besides attacking the president as a “professor of law” and a failure on combating terrorism, Palin criticized his handling of the Christmas Day terror attempt. She said that law enforcement and intelligence agencies had pried little information out of the suspect  before he “lawyered up,” a common refrain among GOP critics that ignores the fact that the Bush administration read shoebomber Richard Reid his rights after almost blowing up an airplane and the Christmas suspect has been talking to government interrogators. But Palin did not let facts get in the way of a speech clearly meant to assert her power over the Tea Party base and rile up the rapturous audience.

The nation is unsafe, she suggested. She spoke of the Nigerian who failed in his attempt to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas Day. “It was a Christmas miracle, and that is not the way the system is supposed to work.” There are questions “this foreign terrorist” should have had to answer “before he was lawyered up,” she said to cheers in the hall (overlooking the fact that he has answered a lot of questions since he was given that reading of his Miranda rights, as authorities have testified.)

“Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at risk,” Palin said. “We are at war….. To win that war, we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”

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“We need a foreign policy that distinguishes America’s friends from her enemies,” she said. “We’re so tired of hearing the talk, talk, talk,” she said. “It’s time for some tough actions, like sanctions on Iran.”

“Foreign policy can’t be managed through the politics of personality,” Palin said. “The problems that we face in the real world require real solutions…. ”

More typical targets for Palin were the president’s domestic policies and issues like the stimulus and government spending.  Her speech was light on ideas or a hint of her own solutions to  the “broken promises” of the Obama presidency, but that did not stop her from assailing the administration for sending stimulus money to “strange places” and puling off “generational theft.”

She mocked the president for his oversight of federal stimulus spending - “because, you know what,” she said sarcastically, “nobody messes with Joe.’ But Vice President Joe Biden’s meetings on transparency were closed to the public, she said, suggesting that “a lot of that stimulus cash ended in strange places, including districts that didn’t exist” - an allusion to the mistake that the administration’s recovery.gov made in reporting the destination of some of the stimulus spending.

“One number we are sure of is the unemployment number…. 9.7 percent now,” Palin said.

“The list of broken promises is long,” she told the crowd.

“We’re drowning in national debt, and many of us have had enough,” Palin said to cheers from a crowd whose name stands for Taxed Enough Already. This week, she said the administration unveiled a “mind-boggling $3.8 trillion budget… They’re sticking our kids with the bill. That’s immoral. That’s generational theft.”

The government, she said, is out of synch with the private sector.

“If you can’t ride two horses at once,” she said, “you shouldn’t be in the circus…. Our government needs to adopt a pro-market agenda,” she said, calling for lower taxes across the board for smaller businesses… They need to get government out of the way. If they would do this, our economy would roar back to life.”

As for her own future and the future of the Tea Party movement she was addressing, Palin had mixed messages. She screamed to the obedient crowd that “America is ready for another revolution!” and chided the “irrelevant” mainstream media (which she is now a part of) for ignoring the power of the conservative grassroots.She termed the Tea Party movement as a “ground-up call for action” that was meant to scare both political parties into fulfilling their agenda for the nation.

But while she cheered the work of the “loyal opposition” and urged Tea Partiers to grow ever bolder in their actions, she stayed coy on her own future with the movement and in national politics, only saying she was thinking how she could “best serve” the country.

“America is ready for another revolution,” Palin told the crowd, an estimated 1,000 or so who had spent at least $300 apiece to see Palin speak at the Gaylord Opryland hotel where the TEA Party convened — “TEA Party nation,” Palin called the crowd. “The TEA Party movement,” she said, is the “future of poltiics” in America — with Palin suggesting that the leaders of both the major political parties “are running scared.”

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“Put your faith in ideas. I caution against allowing this movement to be defined by one leader,” she told the convention crowd. The movement is “a ground-up call to action that’s forcing both parties to change the way they’re doing business.”

Palin, who maintained that none of this is about identifying a new political leader, was asked in a question-and-answer session after her address tonight about “the Palin plan.” It is “simple,” she said, deriding those who have deemed her simple-minded and denouncing “the mainstream media” as “irrelevant,” even as the cable news networks broadcast her talk. It’s about going back to “the foundation” of America, she said — “hard work and responsibility.”

The $1,000-a-plate crowd ignored her presidential ambiguity, jumping to their feet and cheering “run, Sarah, run!” endlessly throughout the evening.

And it was obvious that Palin sees an event like her Tea Party speech as another springboard to national authority and a run in 2012. The convention address is another step on what she believes is a path of the least work possible to gaining a platform from which she can seize the White House. After all, a failed 2008 campaign, a a best-selling memoir, a few wild speeches to her rabid fan base and some Facebook posts have gotten her this far. Why can’t she position herself as the woman who will dethrone Obama by sticking with bumper sticker insults while staying away from any true policy proposals to counter the damage supposedly done by the Obama crew.

Palin’s speech was another in a series of moves from the former governor aimed squarely at her own base, a group of people already singularly devoted to her and a crowd that would die for her just as Palin said she would “die for” the “American people.” This may be a powerful organization when unleashed in certain circumstances, but it’s very clearly not what Americans disaffected by partisan politics are looking for.  Voters’ frustration with President Obama is only exceeded by their disgust with the politics of Washington and the partisan bickering that has stalled any viable agenda from taking shape and impacting a struggling nation.

But the mess on Capitol Hill (which most voters blame on Republicans) is  civil debate compared with the rhetoric emanating from the Tea Partiers and Ms. Palin on Saturday night.  Whether she/they are right or wrong doesn’t matter. As of right now, Americans will not buy the violent outrage they are selling. But can that change? You betcha…

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