Peter Singleton and Michelle McCormick sat across the table from
me at a Bennigan’s restaurant near the Des Moines airport, talking
about their organizing efforts for Sarah Palin in Iowa and
repeatedly referring to what would happen “when” the former Alaska
governor declared her 2012 presidential candidacy. “If you want to
get things going and be proactive, you’ve got to go where the
starting shots are, and that’s Iowa,” McCormick said, while R&B
oldies blared through the Muzak speakers and we waited for the
waitress to bring our sandwiches. Singleton explained that they had
no official affiliation with Palin’s political action committee and
no communication with her staff. “We don’t ask them what they’re
doing and they don’t tell.… We’re totally grassroots, all
volunteers.”
It was Tuesday, August 9, four days before the Ames Straw
Poll and two days before a nationally televised debate between
eight Republican candidates, yet here were Singleton and McCormick
talking about Palin, who was not one of those candidates and who,
according to everyone who knows anything about presidential
politics, had no intention of joining the2012 Republican primary
field. “She’d be crazy to do it,” one of America’s most experienced
political journalists had told me a month earlier, when I’d raised
the possibility of Palin running. “She’s making big money with Fox.
If she got in and lost to [Minnesota Rep. Michele] Bachmann, she’d
be humiliated. No way.”
That was still the conventional wisdom on the Tuesday
before the Iowa straw poll. All the respected experts were agreed,
and yet there I was in Des Moines sitting at a restaurant table
with the volunteer leaders of Iowa
for Palin, who kept talking about “when” she would enter the
race. This annoyed me. These two enthusiasts had left their homes
— Singleton in California, McCormick in Texas — and moved to Iowa
to volunteer as organizers for a non-existent campaign, on behalf
of a make-believe candidate who kept saying she was “considering” a
bid for the White House but who apparently had taken no concrete
steps toward putting together a real campaign. By the time my
two-hour conversation with Singleton and McCormick ended, I was
convinced that they were hopeless dupes who had succumbed to the
delusions of political True Believers. And the very next day,
Sarah Palin announced she was coming to Iowa.
Palin’s visit to Des Moines was no sooner announced than
it was dismissed by all the reputable pundits as a publicity stunt,
a made-for-TV gesture intended strictly to “build her brand” and
maintain her image as “relevant” to the political process as a Fox
News commentator. With Texas
Gov. Rick Perry set to enter the 2012 campaign later that week,
the conventional wisdom said, there simply wasn’t room in the field
for Palin and, after all, hadn’t she endorsed Perry in his 2010 GOP
primary fight against Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison? Hadn’t Palin
praised Perry as a candidate she could support for 2012? Wasn’t
Perry often described as a “Palin ally”?
So said the wise men, the political wizards who get paid
to analyze these things, but I was too busy covering the actual
candidates — the ones who were, in fact, running for president —
to give much thought to Palin, even if all those “whens” uttered by
Singleton and McCormick were still stuck somewhere in my
subconscious. GOP front-runner Mitt
Romney made a rare Iowa visit the same Wednesday afternoon that
Palin announced she was coming to town. Thursday was the big
debate billed as the decisive showdown between Bachmann and
former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Friday, several of the
candidates were scheduled to speak at the Iowa State Fair. It was
at the fairgrounds, after I’d heard
Herman Cain’s stump speech and watched Democratic National
Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz get
heckled off stage by a disgruntled leftist, that I encountered
a swarming crowd of people surrounding Sarah Palin.
Mildly annoyed again — I wasn’t there to cover a
make-believe candidate whose name wasn’t going to be on the straw
poll ballot Saturday at Ames — I elbowed my way into the scrum,
holding aloft my cheap digital camera to snap a few photos and
shoot a 49-second video
clip of the throng around Palin. Let the reader imagine how my
annoyance was intensified when I spotted a familiar face standing
behind the non-candidate: Peter Singleton, smiling and giving me a
thumbs-up gesture. At the time, I didn’t notice Michelle McCormick
at Palin’s left elbow, but both of the Iowa for Palin organizers
were part of the informal security detail escorting Palin around
the fairgrounds as she signed autographs and posed for photos with
her legions of admiring fans.
That was probably the moment when my annoyance turned to
outright anger at the whole ridiculous spectacle, because here I
was being sucked into the vortex of what for all the world looked
like a cheap stunt, a reality-TV simulacrum of a presidential
campaign. However, no one can express skepticism about Palin’s
presidential ambitions without being targeted for the venomous
attacks that the True Believers reflexively unleash on the Beltway
elitists of the “lamestream media,” a category large enough to
encompass everyone except Sean Hannity, Greta van Susteren and the
other Fox News colleagues who enjoy exclusive access to their
network’s star political commentator. It does no good to point out
to the True Believers that I traveled to Ohio in September 2008 to
proclaim Palin the “Sweetheart
of the Heartland,” or stood in the bitter cold of a
Pennsylvania evening among those who were “Stickin’
With the Hockey Mom.” No prior service to the Palinite cause —
not my
knocking down that silly divorce rumor in 2009, not my
mocking of her media critics, nor even my visit
with Todd Palin at his family’s Wasilla home last fall — can
assuage the fury of the True Believers. She’s gonna run,
they insist, and anyone who says otherwise is a hated
enemy.
So I knew full well what I was getting myself into last
week when
I finally blew my top and excoriated the True Believers,
dismissing their talk of a Palin 2012 campaign as “the naive
babblings of chumps who’ve been bamboozled by a show-biz publicity
stunt.” That was the same day a firestorm erupted over
Quin Hillyer’s piece accusing Palin of acting like a “difficult
diva” in a dispute with Daily Caller reporter Alex
Pappas. Amid that “contretemps” (to borrow Quin’s description), I
noticed something that everyone else seemed to be ignoring: Why
should Sarah Palin be so concerned about a headline that mistakenly
implied she had endorsed Mitt Romney? If she was just running a
make-believe campaign to boost her ratings at Fox, couldn’t she
have just shrugged it off? Was it possible that her phone call to
Pappas signified that her prospective candidacy was more serious
than any of the political wizards believed?
However faint a clue this was, there were many other clues
that quickly appeared shortly after I declared my own final
certainty that Palin was not running. There was, for
example, a sort of “radio silence” from the tight circle of Palin’s
staffers. And there was the looming date of September 3, when Palin
was scheduled as keynote speaker at a Tea Party rally in Iowa.
(Originally planned for Waukee, the site was
shifted to Indianola to accommodate a larger crowd.) Hadn’t
Palin previously said she was looking at September as the
fish-or-cut-bait month for her to decide on a campaign? What could
be a more perfect occasion than an Iowa speech to a massive
heartland throng — a “Tea Party Woodstock,” someone has called it
— the Saturday before Labor Day? She would own the news cycle all
weekend, instantly becoming the Number One topic on all the Sunday
shows, and her entry into the 2012 field would overshadow the
September 7 debate at the Reagan Library in exactly the same way
that Perry’s entry had overshadowed the Ames straw poll.
By Tuesday evening, then, I was half-convinced that Palin
was stealthily moving toward an announcement. Then on Friday, she
released a
two-minute online video about her Iowa trip that everyone —
even the wizards who had previously been certain she wasn’t running
— agreed looked like an honest-to-goodness campaign ad. The
signals seemed clear enough that Karl Rove (who is clearly no Palin
fanboy) declared she now “looks
like a candidate, not a celebrity” and expressed his belief
that Palin will get into the race. But if a certified Beltway
elitist like Rove is now convinced she’s running, wouldn’t Palin be
obliged to prove him wrong by not running? So I called up
McCormick to ask if she believed that an announcement was in the
works for the September 3 “Restoring
America” rally, and the Iowa for Palin volunteer wasn’t sure.
“People think if [Palin’s speech] doesn’t say, ‘Hi, I’m Sarah
Palin, I’m running for president,’ it will be not a good deal. But
I really think she’s going to give a monster speech.”
The only two people who really know what Palin is
planning, McCormick said, are Sarah and Todd. The rest of us will
just have to wait until she announces. But her Iowa organizers are
still convinced Palin is getting in — a matter of “when,” not
“if,” they say. Others may doubt, but the True Believers still
believe.
