NASHVILLE — Speaking to the Tea Party convention here last night, Sarah Palin did not have to deliver a substantive speech built around words and ideas.
All she had to do was show up, give her trademark wink and a powerful current of emotion would have passed from her to the crowd of conservatives gathered here.
But in a 40-minute, remarkably detailed speech, Palin laid out what could only be described as the framework of a presidential-campaign platform.
She ran through a host of specifics about recent failures of national-security and economic policies. And she wrapped it up in a heavy sheen of good political rhetoric.
“America is ready for another revolution,” she said, setting the tone for an evening that ended with chants of “Run, Sarah, run!”
Someone had printed up and passed around bumper stickers that read: Palin 2012.
Palin also tried out some new stump lines.
On economic bailouts, she said: “Government has replaced private irresponsibility with public irresponsibility.”
On fighting terrorism, she summed up her stance as: “Bottom line: We win, they lose.”
And she fired several shots directly at President Obama.
“How’s that hope-y, change-y stuff working out for you?,” she quipped.
Palin also took a jab at Obama’s bungling in the aftermath of the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing.
“We need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law,” she said.
Discussing Democrats’ string of electoral losses in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, she said, “When you are oh for three, you better stop lecturing and start listening.”
Palin even waded into tricky territory about Sen. John McCain — perhaps the most loathed politician among this crowd — calling him an “American hero.”
Folks didn’t really applaud, but they didn’t boo either.
Among the Tea Partiers here, Sarah of the Arctic remains a modern day Joan of Arc — sainted for her love for “all God’s children,” heralded for her fearlessness in thwarting the establishment and even revered for her inexperience and flaws that testify to her commonness.
And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that Palin is attractive.
Concluding the convention last night after Palin spoke and answered some questions, organizer Judson Phillips noted that it would have been Ronald Reagan’s 99th birthday.
“I never met Ronald Reagan,” he said. “But I’ve met Sarah Palin.”