The Mudflats

I’d like to thank a very special “Boots on the Ground” reporter and friend, Mudflatter Geoffrey Dunn.  Dunn is finishing up a well-researched book due out this summer titled “The Lies of Sarah Palin.”  He’s having a hard time not making this a three-volume set.  He told me he’d call in a report after seeing Palin’s speech in Redding, California.  Media was barred from the event, so Dunn took one for the team and bought a ticket.

He’d seen Palin before, in Alaska, but now she was coming to his home state, to “the Fairbanks of California” as he called it.  I was interested to see what his impressions would be, and eagerly awaited his phone call last night.  He’d scribbled notes furiously while sitting at the event, and in turn, I scribbled furiously during our phone call.  The following is a combination of his impressions and my own thoughts.

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The country music blared, the crowd was already on its feet cheering, the gigantic American flag was draped across the back of the stage, and red-jacketed, black high-heeled Sarah Palin strode on to the stage to thunderous applause.  This was not a VP campaign stop in 2008.  This happened yesterday in California, and it was Sarah Palin’s first speech after telling Chris Wallace on Sunday that it would be “absurd” for her not to consider a 2012 presidential run.  This was her first campaign speech for the presidential primary.

Palin’s appearance was hosted by the Sierra Cascade Logging Conference, and the Redding Convention Center was sold out.  2000 tickets that ranged in price from $50 to $75 a piece were gone  in less than an hour.  Another appearance was hastily added for a few hours later.  She is rumored to have pocketed $150,000 today.

Her mission was clear – generate grass roots support, and reforge her narrative for the presidential challenge ahead.  Gone were the snarky swipes at Obama, gone was the “mean girl” rhetoric, gone was terror talk.  She hammered home a populist message, punctuated with tales of her own accomplishments when she held elected office in Alaska - tales spun from the revisionist history found in her best-selling book, Going Rogue.

Free-market principles, and limited regulation were touted.  Big banks and big government were in the cross-hairs.  Environmentalists were the enemy-du-jour.  Palin was back in the “Real America” and the logging crowd was on its feet.

“You’re proof that the best of America is not all gathered in Washington, D.C.!”

“The government needs to stop playing politics with your responsible livelihoods!”

“You guys were doing ‘green jobs’ before they were cool!”

She said that she and her family knew what it was like to have a “politically incorrect” job because they’re fishermen.  Over and over the message was, “I’m one of you.”

The anti-evironmental sentiment could not have been clearer.  The one-time governor who sued the federal government over listing polar bears as an endangered species, came out swinging.  Global warming, she said, is ”a buch of snake oil science.”  She told the crowd how pleased she was that President Obama was not more successful at the recent climate conference in Copenhagen,calling the lack of progress “providential.”  She wanted him to fail.  Climate change is, she said, “bogus.”

Her speech was peppered with negatives – Van Jones is a communist, Nancy Pelosi boo hiss, but she was speaking with a voice designed to rally the troops. “Government bureaucracy has broken faith with the people that they are supposed to be serving,” was the message that was repeated over and over again.

She brought up the fact that the “lame stream” media had been making fun of her for having notes on her hand. She’s a busy hockey mom, she told them.  She writes notes everywhere.  As a matter of fact, she had notes on her hand tonight, she told the crowd.  She showed the palm of her hand and read the words, “Loggers rock!”  The crowd went wild.

Eight year old Piper Palin made an appearance on stage at the end, and was acknowledged by her mom.  She stayed while Palin signed copies of Going Roguethat audience members had brought with them to get the coveted signature.   The book tour is officially over, and yet Palin is appearing across the country at events just like this.  She is no longer selling books.  She’s now selling herself.

She is using the same rhetoric, and the same populist appeal she used in Alaska when talking about the oil companies, and the corrupt Republican good ol’ boys.  Her establishment of “ACES” (Alaska’s Clear and Equitable Share) which imposed heavier taxes on big oil is now in danger of collapse.  The Republicans she fought so hard against are seeking to dismantle what happened under her administration and pass new measures that would act as a billion dollar gift to big oil.  When Palin left office, it was under the guise of being able to help Alaska from the outside, rather than the inside.   But on ACES, her only bipartisan legacy, her voice is silent.  Instead she’s telling funny jokes to the logging industry.

“When a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear it….”

“what happens to environmental lawsuits?”

But before you start thinking that Palin is just a carbon-spewin’, polar bear drownin’, coal burnin’ destructionist, she did concede that she does consider herself a conservationist. “I named my daughter Willow.  Isn’t that granola enough for them?”  Apparently that’s all we environmentalists (assuming that we are “them“) need to make it all better.  Just get fringe right wing presidential wannabees to start naming their children Rainbow, and Tofu and Daffodil, and everyone will live happily ever after.

In 2006 it was Conoco-Phillips;  at the Tea Party last Saturday it was terrorism; today it was the environmentalists, but the formula is the same.  Each day and at each event, she will create a custom-made dragon and ask the crowd to join her in the slaying.

As the overwhelmingly white, older, working-class crowd made its way out of the building, it was obvious that they were impressed, and there wasn’t anyone who believed she wouldn’t be running for President in 2012.  To Palin, these sell-out crowds who give her ovation after ovation mean one thing – God has opened another door, and she’s ready to plow through it.

[Geoffrey Dunn will be a guest on today's Shannyn Moore Show during the first hour of the show that starts at 11am Alaska time, 12pm Pacific, 1pm Eastern.  Click HERE to listen live!]