National Party News

Sarah Palin gave a great speech Saturday night in Nashville at the Tea Party convention. She is preparing to engage on a national level in a significant way, on Fox News, campaigning in primaries and possibly general-election campaigns this fall and staying on the speaking tour. According to Sunday's New York Times, Palin has created a circle of advisers who probably wrote that speech and keep her informed on the issues of the day. She is admittedly prepping herself for a new role: someone prepared to talk about policy, not just about herself.

They paid Sarah Palin $100,000 — for what?

If I were the organizers of that event — or one of the “grassroots” teabaggers who shelled out $349 for a steak-and-lobster dinner — I’d demand my money back.

For 45 minutes, all Palin did was string together a lame collection of clichés and cheap shots, without offering one idea of her own. Three times, she called for “common-sense conservative solutions to problems” — without suggesting even one of them.

Sarah Palin’s speech to the Tea Party Convention at Nashville brought to my mind the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, when Doc Watson and Bob Dylan were just anybody. It was raw and unpretentious, unformed and unscripted, informal and from the heart, but the beginning of something purely original and of vast and natural willfulness which appears to just now be awakened and will not be held back.

Because they felt left out, Senate Democrats invited President Barack Obama to give them an opportunity to give their struggling individual campaigns a boost on national television.

Blanche Lincoln, who is down big in the polls in her home state of Arkansas, told the president, “People out there watching us, they see us nothing more than Democrats and Republicans up here fighting.”

When Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, it was one of the great best-sellers in history and made a ton of money by 1776 standards. Paine donated all of the money, every penny of it, for the troops of the continental army. Sarah Palin, by contrast, gives a populist speech at a Tea Party convention, and donates the money to herself.

The word charlatan is defined as a person who practices quackery or confidence tricks in order to gain fame or money. Sarah Palin is America's leading Tea Party charlatan, in very good company with many on the Republican side of the aisle.

All we can focus on here in Washington today is how irritated we are by the coming 20 inches of snow and how weepy we feel over the departure of Tai Shan, our beloved panda who departs the Smithsonian National Zoo today to go back to China. OK, maybe misty is more like it.

But in Nashville, the Tea Partiers are gathering today for quite a party — their first convention. Sarah Palin, as you probably already know, is speaking. And the organizers have all been fighting with each other, since, as you probably already know, there isn't one Tea Party.

Back before a couple of conglomerates took over nearly all the stations with their vanilla playlists and avatar disc jockeys, radio used to have personalities who had, if you can imagine, PERSONALITIES.

They reflected the taste of their individual communities. Often bad taste, to be sure, but their banter and particularly the music they played reflected the characteristics and peculiarities of their metro areas. And no market was more peculiar than Washington.

A.B. Stoddard answers viewer questions about which party will benefit most from a show of bipartisanship, and looks at some of the president's budget plan.

Today, the president unveils his budget, which will promise the highest deficit in history. Tomorrow, voters in Illinois will traipse to the first primary of the 2010 election season.

While these events are not connected by anything other than coincidence, one will have a profound impact on the other.

The president and his team have a new strategy in dealing with congressional Republicans.

Mr. Obama went to Baltimore last Friday and took more than an hour of his schedule to thrust and parry with the abused House Republican minority.

And then yesterday morning, David Axelrod, the president’s top strategist, went on “Meet the Press” right before House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and continued the administration’s efforts to promote the new theme: The House Republicans share responsibility for the White House failures.