What's Sarah Palin going to say in her big speech on Saturday?
On Saturday Sarah Palin is giving a big speech to an Iowa tea party rally, if you haven’t heard. What’s she going to say?
One thing she’s apparently not going to say is that she’s running for president. At least, she won’t say that directly. She’s hit back so strongly at pundits who predicted she might announce at the Iowa meeting that it’s hard to imagine her backing down now.
That said, reports indicate she’s going to use this forum, before people who might be her core supporters, for a two-pronged political offensive of the sort a presidential candidate might make.
First, she may try to outflank potential Republican primary opponents by portraying herself as the most genuine political outsider. According to National Review Online, she’s going to mention Washington’s “compromised political class,” for instance. Hmm, who might be a member of that? Maybe ... Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) of Minnesota, another tea party favorite? Bachmann is a three-term US lawmaker, which by some people’s definitions might make her a career politician.
Palin will also offer a “serious critique of crony capitalism,” according to National Review. Might that be a bank shot aimed at Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the new GOP frontrunner? He’s sometimes accused of steering state contracts to campaign donors, back home.
We’re not saying Palin will mention Bachmann and Perry by name. What we’re saying is that she could be laying the groundwork to explain why she is a different choice than other insurgent-like candidates. She might say she’s the true, original maverick. Going Rogue!
The second prong of her political thrust here will be aimed at President Obama. No surprise there – last week Palin tweeted “I’ll be talking about this and more on September 3,” and included a link to a YouTube video titled “Obama Lies 7 Times in 2 Minutes.”
(Interestingly, most of the “lies” mentioned here are promises by Obama to make the government more transparent and to eliminate earmarks and sweetheart deals. Maybe that will fit into the whole “compromised political class” thing.)
What’s the central thing Palin will criticize about Obama? We’ll give you a hint – it starts with “government” and ends with “spending.”
Earlier this month on her Facebook page Palin posted a longish piece about the US having its credit rating downgraded by S & P, and we’re pretty sure she’s going to be drawing on the themes included therein. In a pecan nutshell: we’ve got too much debt, and sooner or later the financial markets will extract an awful toll for that.
“We need to get serious about our deficit. No more accounting gimmicks. No more cuts in ‘out-years’ that never materialize. The permanent political class in DC might be fooling themselves with these Enron-like accounting games, but they’re not fooling the world’s capital markets,” Palin wrote.
That sounds to us like it’s aimed at the GOP establishment as well as Democrats. Does it sound like that to you?
(Interestingly – and this is a complete aside – Palin’s Facebook posting quotes Bob Dylan’s famous line “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Dylan scholars say that this is the single most-referred-to song lyric in Supreme Court and other legal rulings in history.)
Palin’s appearance Saturday will be carried live on C-SPAN, by the way. She’s scheduled to begin at 11, Central Standard Time.
